Lake Farm Hill Climb: Archer Hella EC-D i360
Channel: Simon Brooke
Date: 08/05/2021

A review of the Archer Hella from Cyberpunk 2077


Not all the cars of Cyberpunk 2077 are sports cars, as we've seen. Not all have improbable performance, not even those that are improbably expensive. And there are, as again we've seen, some vehicles which aren't improbably expensive; some, even, that one can get for free. 

The car I'm going to review in this episode is one such. You not only can get it for free, you will get it for free: at the start of Act One, you already own it: the Archer Hella.

 One should not, they say, look gift horses in the mouth. 

My first Citroen came in a colour which was called 'Brun Cigale'; it was a standing joke that this probably meant 'shit brown'. Your Hella is Brun Cigale with a contrast stripe of faded gold. It looks something like a large 1980s SAAB; a huge ugly barge of a car, with the waistline rising sharply at the 'C' pillar, and odd plastic spoilers stuck on for no discernible  reason.

It's not excessively tatty.

Like so many cars in the Cyberpunk world, it has only one headlight. 

Inside, the sewage-works colour scheme continues. It's clearly seen better days, but it also clearly wasn't a high quality vehicle from the start. It does, however, have a wealth of knobs and buttons to twiddle, or at least look at; and an ugly nodding dog on the dashboard, for company.

It drives off smoothly enough, with a somewhat high pitched and thrashy engine sound. It manages the dogleg onto the main road almost tidily. But once on the beginning of the climb I'm faced with this Archer Quartz, and my instinct is to overtake; but the Hella hasn't got the legs so I drop in behind.

The engine noise here is perfectly acceptable. 

I can't blame the car for the mess I make of the first hairpin; I turned in too sharply here, this is driver error. But correcting it I lost traction at 14 miles per hour, under modest acceleration. Correcting my line through the second hairpin I lose traction again. 

Again I'm faced with a car ahead, and this time I do overtake it successfully, but the consequence is that I enter the third hairpin too fast -- which is driver error -- and then, because the throw of the steering joystick is so short, get into a fishtail. Neither of those is a problem with the car, as such. 

Again I come into the fourth hairpin faster than I should in this car, over steer, over correct, and then lose traction, side swiping the armco. This is poor driving, too, but the poor traction and vague steering don't help. 

In the fifth hairpin I lose the backend spectacularly, but recover from that loss reasonably tidily before disastrously failing to negotiate the top corner.

So, overall, what do I think?

The Hella is worth every eddie you pay for it, and not a eurocent more. It's a heap, it looks like a heap, it handles like a heap, and it performs like a heap.

Oh, look, some kind person has left a much nicer car at the top here.