Cyberpunk 2077 sure is one of the video games of all time. I put ~110 hours into it so I can’t criticize it too much I guess. The core gameplay is decent enough for me to largely enjoy it throughout. It’s pretty. I spent most of my time riding around in what is basically the Akira motorcycle. Everyone has an undercut.

It’s somewhat admirable what they seemed to want to achieve with the story. Unlike a lot of other sci-fi stories, it mostly focuses on personal stakes. Although, the stakes are not very tangible as a player, since it’s mostly about personal legacy and whether or not the player character survives past the end of the game.

They seemed to want to create interesting, flawed characters who are involved with morally grey choices. In my opinion the only actually interesting character though is Johnny Silverhand. This is good because he’s there for a lot of the game! But he’s far from the only character, including 4 whole love interests. I don’t hate any of the other characters, but I don’t enjoy them very much either. And you spend a lot of time talking to barely even sketched characters, like the fixers.

And as for the choices… I’m just not impressed. There’s a handful of vaguely interesting things in certain points, but it’s hampered a lot by the weak character writing. It’s hard to care about these choices when the characters they are about are uninteresting, underdeveloped, and overall just poorly written. There’s also the reality that despite ostensibly being a criminal most of the side quests you do are very “justified” morally. There’s evidence that other “mercs” take straight up evil jobs for money, but those aren’t really available for you. The only exception is a few side quests in the Phantom Liberty DLC. I thought that these flirted with the idea of making more mercenary (lol) choices but in practice the outcomes are still to abstract and the difference in rewards too little.

I do appreciate that there’s no “all good” ending. Most of the endings concern how you deal with your certain death. That’s fine, I suppose, but the weak character writing combined with V being a cipher with little to distinguish one version from the next compounds into the implications falling flat for me. Even the option of V’s body becoming inhabited by Johnny Silverhand doesn’t hold much weight because it has so little effect on anything I care about.

Gameplay is pretty mid. It’s a standard-ish “stealth or action choice” of modern game design. There’s a number of missions where stealthing gives an extra reward, but the areas feel like they’re poorly designed for that possibility. Hacking feels way too powerful for stealth, especially since you can turn off or access cameras if you’re in line of sight. I didn’t feel like I was figuring out an interesting puzzle of a level but instead mostly reacting to indvidual moments.

Combat-oriented quickhacks feel underdeveloped as well. I never felt like I was doing anything other than extra damage or picking off from the large pool of enemies. And honestly my guns did that a lot better most of the time.

Ultimately, I spent a lot of this game thinking about other games which are better than it in one aspect or another. But hey at least it’s decent enough to play.