Cyberpunk 2077 Review: A Big Shiny World

Finally, we got Cyberpunk 2007 after a long development process and lots of postponements. But we can easily say that the game did’t meet the expectations with its release. Lots of bugs, poor optimisation and AI problems are everywhere. But Cyberpunk 2077 is still a great game and full of potential. We are sure that CD Projekt Red will solve the release issues by the time. After our 20 hour gameplay review, let’s check out our detailed Cyberpunk 2077 review.

Cyberpunk 2077 Review

As we all know, Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in a city called Night City. At first, the name of the city was Coronado, but after the death Richard Night, developers changed the name to Night City. And the most important detail about the Cyberpunk Universe is that its history is dating back to 1800’s. You witness the stories of some key characters during the game. For those who are familiar to the Cyberpunk Universe, Johnny Silverhand, his girlfriend Alt Cunningham or Rogue and Adam Smasher are some key characters. And those characters featured in the game in a way.

At first, Cyberpunk 2077 world might seem small but it is actually full of details and there is a living world. I can easily say that the game world gave me the best “living world” experience till now. There are gigantic buildings and skyscrapers in night City, and the city has a vertical structure at some points. As soon as you step out of your apartment, you really feel that you are in a gigantic world. You feel dizzy and shocked when you see the neon lights, skyscrapers, crowded people around, flying cars and the futuristic atmosphere. But the biggest problem in the city is that the population is not balanced. As expected, the city center is crowded but some regions of the map is really “empty”. And that makes you feel lost.

Night City is a colourful city but it is also dark and dangerous. You may encounter a different events at every corner of the city. You may come across an armed robbery and become a part of it in a moment. Or you can decide whether to help or not to a robbery victim. When you are in your own region, you solve those problems very easily. But if you try to be a hero in the dark parts of the city, I can say that you will be wasted in a very short time.

When you are following your quests, the navigations always shows the main roads to go there. Once I found a shortcut and decided to drive in that shortcut. Here, some gang members blocked my way and I had a small clash with them. Events like these managed to give the brutal atmosphere of the Night City.

Cyberpunk 2077 is full of quests. There are lots of quests to be done outside of the main quest of the game. There are hundreds of points to visit in night City. When you open your map, you see that there are lots of things to do even in a very small area. There are many places to interact like implant points, restaurants, night clubs or gun shops. And I have to say that your phone never stops ringing. Even as you are on a quest, your phone rings and you got a new quest and unlock a new area. When you say that “I’m busy and I cannot deal with this at the moment.”, this time your phone starts to receive messages.

Apart from the main missions, there are mini-missions and question marks on your map. This system is very similar to Witcher 3. These missons may be small thefts or easy tasks but sometimes you may encounter really funny and nice missions. The biggest problem in the quest system is that sometimes it feels “disconnected”. Sometimes you found yourself in a quest that you don’t know why and how you are doing that quest. There is a small problem about this.

There are seven different regions in the game world: Watson, Westbrook, Heywood, Pacifica, Santo Domingo, City Center and Badlands. If you don’t count the starting scenarios, you start the game in the Watson area. Your apartment is also in Watson.

Deciding Your Destiny

You may start the game with three lifepaths in Cyberpunk 2077 called Nomad, Street Kid and Corporal. The story starts differently after you choose one of those lifepaths. All of them allow you to start the story at a different point in the game. And sometimes you might also get some advantages. Let’s check those lifepaths.

Nomad: This selection actually has the most interesting story in the lifepath section. Because you start the game outside the Night City. We pick up a cargo to deliver in the Night City and our car got broken on the way to the city. It is really nice to see and drive in that barren lands right at the start of the game. With this lifepath, you can portray a more free-spirited character. But when you are in Night City, things might get a little complicated. In Night City, some characters don’t like foreigners and they might snub you in some dialogue choices.

Street Kid: This lifepath provides a story where you grew up among gangs, mobs and snatches. We start this lifepath with the quest which we steal a car. But as you expected, things got out of control after a while. The biggest advantage of choosing Street Kid is that you get additional dialogue choices when talking to gang members and low ranked characters.

Corpo: As the name suggests, corpo lifepath selection provides a gameplay experience that you can start at a higher level. In this lifepath, we experience all the crap of the upper level. The biggest advantage of this lifepath is that it activates new dialogues when talking with higher level characters.

After I tried all three lifepaths, I decided to start the game with the Street Kid lifepath. One of the biggest problem in the game is the lifepath system After a while all the lifepaths intersect  at the same point. They don’t make a big addition to the main progress. All lifepath scenarios intersect at the same point after 20-25 minutes and the lifepath selection just provides some different dialogue options.

But sometimes, these selections provides some different solutions in some quests. For example, when you have a company building to enter, you can find a different solution without having to use any weapons if you have chosen the corpo lifepath.

I want to give another example with the Street Kid lifepath I play. I went to a question mark on the map and I solved a problem for a restaurant owner. After I get my payment, I was going out of the restaurant but suddenly 4-5 armed people came inside. At this point, you can get the help of your weapons and get rid of the problem. But as I am playing with the Streed Kid lifepath, I got a different dialogue option. It was saying: “If you are working in this area, you are definitely in the gang, but I cannot see their symbolic jackets on you. If you attempted a robbery without letting your leader know, it is clear that you hammered the last nail on your coffin.”. After hearing this warning, the robbers left the restaurant in a funny way without looking their back.

Earrings or Piercings or Tattoos or All of Them?

After choosing your lifepath, you get on to the character creation and skill point selection screen. In character creation screen, you first decide if you want to play as a male or female characater. After the gender selection, you can choose one of the three characters or a random one. But if you want to choose every single detail of your character like nails, ears, nose, eyes, earrings and etc., you have the chance to to so. It is possible to create very different characters with these options.

The most interesting section of the character creation screen is the genital area. You can choose to have a penis or vagina and decide the size of your penis. You can even have a penis on your female character or you can have a vagina on your male character.

After the character creation, you are asked to distribute your skill points. In this screen, there are three main parts and you have seven points to distribute. In the beginning, you distribute these skill points under five groups: Body, intelligence, reflexes, technical ability and serenity. Traits such as the character’s strength, health status or melee abilities are gathered in the Body option. The intelligence section mostly effects your hacking time and networking. When we look at reflexes, we encounter factors such as avoiding enemy attacks, critical hit chance or the damage caused by Z blades. Speaking of Z Blades, I want to say that when you get the double jump implant and have Z Blades, you become an unstoppable butcher. Technical ability effects our lock-picking or using technological weapons skills. And serenity is about our resistance and stealthiness.

When you are reading this section of my Cyberpunk 2077 review, you can feel that there are so few abilities and skills. But as soon as you start the game, you start to realise that there are lots of options on character abilities. For example, when you are in the Body section from the character option, you see the Athletic, Destructive and Scrappy tabs. There are tens of options under these tabs that you can improve your character.

For example, there is a locked door and you need at least seven points to open that door. You can increase your lock-picking ability with the attribute points. In short, we can say that the character development system of the game is actually divided into skill trees within itself.

Of course we do have an inventory system. In your inventory, you can choose three weapons to equip, and choose the clothes and armour you wear. There are lots of different weapon types in the game. Pistols, machine guns, heavy weapons, melee weapons and etc. And you get lots of models under these main tabs. Until the part I played, I came across dozens of different models with pistols. And there are more technologically effective weapons in the game like shock guns, rifles with bullet spin. You can sell the weapons and scraps that you collect. Even doing like this, I can say that I made a small fortune for my character. I bought lots of cars by selling the loot I have. You can also produce your own weapons or ammunition with the scraps you collect.

Except for random conflicts during the quest process, I never encountered a recurring task will now. Of course there are similar side quests like stealing a car or destroy a specific target. But I can say that the story really flows in the main quests. Even in the starting points of the game, you face with unexpected events and exciting situations. Sometimes I just cleared side quests for days. Especially Badlands races are really enjoyable. Steering thru sandstorms makes you really excited.

Severed Arms and Legs

Now, let’s check the fighting dynamics. First of all, I have to say that even there are some problems, the fighting dynamics are nice. But as I said, there are problems. First of all, “hit feel” is very low in both close and armed combats. Fortunately, you enjoy conflicts more as your character develops. For example, at the start of the game I was only using katanas, light guns and machine guns. But after I unlocked Z Blades, I stopped using those weapons. Because Z blades literally create the feeling of carrying katana in your arms.

Using bombs in combats and hacking computer systems are really nice. The fights are intense and bloody most of the time. If you have a good weapon, I guarantee that you always see severed arms and legs flying. Another negative point is the poor artificial intelligence. AI gets a little twisted in crowded fights.

Let’s get to the graphics and technical details of the game. First of all, I have to say that CD Projekt Red designed a very beautiful world. Apart from the huge skyscrapers and futuristic buildings, even the street lighting and the graffiti on the walls were carefully emphasised. But I have to say that I encountered different errors such as disappearing characters, disrupted subtitles or floating objects. But these bugs will probably be fixed with updates in the near future.

I played the game with the Gigabyte NVidia GeForce RTX 3080 Eagle while I write my Cyberpunk 2077 review. Because in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, the importance of technologies such as RTX and DLSS has really been great. Lightning is very important in Cyberpunk 2077 world and you can even notice the lights reflected from fluorescent lamps or reflected from advertising signs. Naturally, when you play the game with RTX, this effects are much more clear.

Apart from lighting, we should not skip the Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination effects because they have a great impact on the atmosphere. When you look at the details, these technologies determine how beautiful and realistic even the smallest object you encounter. For example, you are under a bridge or a closed space. Normally, each area has the same shading, but when you turn on RTX, you see that each wall or bridge pillar receives a different light.

You can change many options in the graphics settings of the game. In addition to low, medium, high and ultra selections, RTX High and RTX Ultra selections are also included for the ray tracing option. DLSS technology not only provides sharpness in distant details, but also greatly affects the performance. In the DLSS option, you can choose between balanced, visual, performance and ultra performance options. Even if you keep the settings on automatic when DLSS is turned on, you will see 25-30 FPS difference. In short, these technologies, which also affect the atmosphere, have managed to make a great contribution to the integrity of the game.

Let’s come to the bugs which are the main reason of big discussions. To be honest, Cyberpunk 2077 really has a lot of bugs. Nested NPCs, characters passing through walls, objects hanging in the air and etc. While writing my Cyberpunk 2077 review, I haven’t encountered myself, errors such as falling under the map, game crashing are some things that shouldn’t be in such a game. That kind of bugs make you feel like you are not playing a finished game but testing an alpha or beta version of the game. We can say that the game still needs time to become a better one.

We shouldn’t skip the soundtrack in our Cyberpunk 2077 review. Apart from the songs prepared exclusively for the game, the selection of tracks and atmosphere sounds are very successful. Listening to music when you are travelling with your car, choosing between radio stations are really nice details in the game. I also liked the design of the car interiors. You can see every detail such as the frequency bar while changing the radio station. Driving feel is also not perfect but not that bad to ruin the gameplay experience.

If you are comparing the game with GTA or Far Cry, I can say that you are making a mistake. If you think like that, I can easily say that the game will be a big dissappointment for you.

Cyberpunk 2077 Review: Conclusion

As a result, Cyberpunk 2077 has managed to be a game that attracts attention especially with its huge world and details. There are lots errors, lost bugs but the general structure of the game is so enjoyable that despite these problems, I played the game with great pleasure. And I can easily say that I never got bored while I was playing and writing Cyberpunk 2077 review. But if you want to play a stable and smooth game, I need to say that you have to wait a little more.

I hope you enjoyed our Cyberpunk 2077 review. Stay tuned and enjoy.