JUDGEment: Cyberpunk 2077
By: Judge Castle
Tags: Fun, Short Read, Games, Gaming, Review

I typically review movies in a quick and easy format because I feel that there was a hole in the review space that people who don’t have a lot of time could read them and get a gist if it was worth spending the time and money to go out and see them in theaters. COVID kind of borked that whole idea so I’ve been waiting to write about something worthwhile. I have been waiting very impatiently for Cyberpunk 2077 for about 7 years like most of the world and the fact that it’s finally here is amazing, for some, mostly PC players it’s great. I wanted to come from a perspective of having played the game for an extensive time period. I’m at this point near 30 hours in, still in Act 2 as I have been doing a lot of side content so take that into consideration.

Consensus:

Cyberpunk 2077 will be an all time great game 6 months to a year from now. I am someone who took time off work to play this game on release because I can’t travel. I was hyped. While that hype has been met in ways, there are things in this game that I wish that it would have been delayed another year. As much as that would have hurt me because of how badly I wanted to play the game, I would have rather seen it just come out when it was clearly ready and not when it did because of the lack of a polished semi bug free experience. I expect to have bugs with a game the scope of this size, we’ve all played Bethesda games and have seen the bugs but this feels to surpass that and it is frustrating.

At the end of the day, I would recommend waiting on Cyberpunk. Give them a few months to patch the game and if you have a next gen console, wait for that upgrade patch and it will hopefully be worth jumping into at that point for you.

Positives:

Gameplay: The gunplay which is majority of the action you will experience is solid. Reminds me of Fallout 4 in the fact that it’s not as solid or responsive as Call of Duty, but, it’s still serviceable and you can manage to get through the whole game using guns. Melee weapons are also in the game and are literally just as viable as guns, whether you’re using a katana, knife, bat, and other melee weapons, they are just as lethal as guns which makes melee runs very enjoyable.

I am personally using a melee build with a single silent revolver for stealth head shots. It is working for me.

Story: The plot line so far is the best part of the game. Whether it be a quick side mission, a gig from a fixer or the main quest itself, the game has me invested in most of the characters. The gangs have a unique style which you can tell if you stop to listen and read some of the lore about them in the game. The voice acting is great for English and I’m really just enjoying the atmosphere the game exudes. CDPR know how to build a world and amazingly grim and engaging story lines.

Middling:

Graphics: So pending where you are playing the game, this will be wildly different. I am playing on PC with a 2080 and a Ryzen 7 1800x processor. The graphical output for me is 1440p around 70–100 frames so the performance is good but the way the game looks can go from gorgeous to down right muddy pending on what you’re looking at and this is on a high performance PC. I can’t imagine what it looks like when you’re on something not as powerful or even a console. I really like the way Night City looks, especially when it is raining at night, but, there are some things like bright colored clothes that the details just get muddy mashed together so it is odd. This as other things can be ironed out.

Sounds: The guns, cars, and voice acting are very good in this game. Why is this middling then? The mix that the game has by default which I play through a soundbar can be very bad. When I walk up to someone and hit Talk, their voice sounds like they are screaming at me. They are much louder than any other sound around me, even if I’m by a highway with cars blowing by me. Cars when you hit a max speed, which with a lot of the traveling you’re doing, you will hit the max speed on vehicles and the sound just gets grating. If you go into cockpit mode in a car while going fast, you lose the engine sound and then when you go back to an exterior view, it comes back with a deafening vengeance.

Bad:

Bugs: So I’ve had my fair share of the visual bugs. Mostly occurring in the open world so they haven’t ruined any story related missions. I am all about immersion and staying in that mind frame for as long as possible. With the Witcher 3, that game was able to keep me under and immersed for hours at a time and it was glorious. With CP2077, I feel like with all the glitches I have experienced, it pulls me out pretty often and that is making me kind of jaded about the experience at times. When I’m on a story mission and everything is scripted, the game is at it’s peak. When I am cruising around night city and I see a palm tree graphically glitch and become blurred and then bend to the ground around me, it reminds me that I am in a game, and it ruins my immersion. You will notice the thing that breaks the most is the civilians or NPCs that just walk around and they are walking with their flair and experience another person and then they will T pose or they will avoid them and then it breaks the AI routine and they just stop. It has been very odd things that have pulled me out. I have others such as mini map glitches, no audio glitches that are more intrusive but these are the ones that I see the most often.

Consensus:

Cyberpunk 2077 will be an all time great game 6 months to a year from now. I am someone who took time off work to play this game on release because I can’t travel. I was hyped. While that hype has been met in ways, there are things in this game that I wish that it would have been delayed another year. As much as that would have hurt me because of how badly I wanted to play the game, I would have rather seen it just come out when it was clearly ready and not when it did because of the lack of a polished semi bug free experience. I expect to have bugs with a game the scope of this size, we’ve all played Bethesda games and have seen the bugs but this feels to surpass that and it is frustrating.

At the end of the day, I would recommend waiting on Cyberpunk. Give them a few months to patch the game and if you have a next gen console, wait for that upgrade patch and it will hopefully be worth jumping into at that point for you.