Bugs as a sign of punk? We review Cyberpunk

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A grandiose tragedy

There is no doubt that the CD Projekt RED (CDPR) has left its hands on the game, after all, eight-year development is (fortunately) a rarity today. (Star Citizen greetings.) Even the monster projects that spit French Ubisoft from their dream factories year after year don’t last that long. But on games like Assassins Creed, much less ambitious, he wants to add, they make literally hundreds, if not thousands, of developers. CDPR is overrated, despite all its successes and strong stocks, essentially an indie studio. And Cyberpunk 2077 is such a big bite that even long development and overtime could not prevent the tragedy that swept the whole game off the road just after leaving the long tunnel.

If you believe in the concept of parallel worlds, in at least one of them, Cyberpunk 2077 is the game of the year and quite possibly the whole outgoing generation of consoles. The world of the neon of the enlightened future presented by CDPR is masterfully exposed, deep to the ears and so wide that you need four (or two) wheels to get to the other end. RPG elements let you do whatever you want with the enemies, and sneak through, through the streets of Night City, sneak, crawl or hack at the height of your choice. The story is long, intricate, with few exceptions well written, and it’s a pleasure to go through it and reveal where that rabbit rabbit actually leads. Follow the white rabbit …

Glitch and glamour

Unless, of course, it gets stuck somewhere. Like a cyber samurai, in full armor made of Kevlar plates and with a machine gun in his hand, which was to prevent us from escaping by elevator from one particularly hot situation. But the brave warrior had other plans to perform the spell of disappearance and discovery in an awkward position, with his back to his juices and his head bowed. Did anyone forget to turn it on?

We get on the elevator with my partner, hold on to his stomach and bleed, followed by a short ride on the elevator during which a tense word exchange takes place. The situation is bad, the adrenaline music beats to the rhythm of a furiously beating heart. And the defeated samurai, twisted between us on the floor of the elevator, suddenly jumps into the air like a jerk out of a box. And again and again, while the shot buddy comes to terms with fate. But the samurai had not yet said the last word, and before the elevator ride ended, his arm shot to the ceiling as if announcing the last word. Silence!

And Cyberpunk 2077 is full of such situations. Enemies passing through the heat of battle through walls, teleporting or spawning beside you. Our partner, in the middle of a frantic and loud shootout, whispers with all urgency that it is necessary to hide, otherwise the enemy will see us. And we could go on, but maybe it’s clear to you – of course, yes, YouTube videos with all sorts of bugs have been circulating on the Internet since the game was released.

Truman show 2077

But Cyberpunk 2077 does not only suffer from humorous, embarrassing or annoying mistakes, after which the ground falls, as soon as enough time has passed and the CD Projekt RED will release the Game of the Year edition. In a year, maybe? What neither time nor tens of gigabytes of patches can solve is an empty world that is incredibly harmful to the game on several levels. The first is related to what we described above. Bugs in artificial intelligence and shortcomings in scripts are really burning in the streets of Night City and are constantly pulling out of the atmosphere that CDPR is trying to build. The second is that Night City is just a backdrop in which the creators could not employ enough extras.

This manifests itself not only when you are not following the main storyline, but also during it. For example, if you come to one of the most famous clubs in the city to soon come to a room where two pudduls are dancing on 50 square meters, the third vomits and the fourth leans lethargically against the wall. Even in scripted moments, the creators simply fail to create a convincing enough illusion that you are in a rampant megalopolis, where something is still happening and with whom and what to interact with. Barely dozens of people walk the streets at a time, so it looks as if there is a sharp quarantine in Night City during the coronavirus period. And even in our humble metropolis with hundred towers, you would count more people on the street today than Night City.

It’s even worse when you get in a car and want to drive around a large city. In addition, while driving, you come across an absolutely hardened AI controlling the local (weak) traffic, which completely collapses the moment you park in the middle of the intersection and leave the vehicle there. The vast majority (from many seemingly interesting) stalls or shops are also completely non-interactive and NPCs keep repeating one and the same, often meaningless sentence – for example, a woman soothing a collapsed man informs you about the weather on request.

Gray, green, blue, purple …

But it’s not just a dysfunctional world that pushes Cyberpunk 2077 much lower than we’d like. The CD Project RED tried to combine much more than just GTA with a taste of cyberpunk and the Sorcerer in a fit of megalomania. The second design spell of the modern age is, in addition to the open world philosophy, also the looter shooter genre, which serves as a black hand. As a result, you will not only drown in hordes of worthless (but color-coded) loot from the beginning, but also protracted skirmishes with enemies and their inflated health supplies.

At the same time, it is not at all exceptional that during one major shootout you can easily replace a few queues, gradually collected from the ground, just because the new rifle is half a percent stronger than the previous one. Forget about some arsenal jewelry (even though it’s here), it’s a waste of time. In the RPG genre, where in addition to numbers and statistics, it is also important to build a relationship with your own avatar and his equipment, so this design decision is at least annoying.

Where the element of the looter shooter manifests itself with even greater burning is stealth, another of the pillars of local gameplay. A whole skill tree focuses on this style of play, but what’s the point when you can’t send an enemy to the ground with a single blow (to the head)? That, on the other hand, you can pacify the guard with a deadly (and non-deadly) hurry from behind, there is a certain rescue on the one hand and another illogicality in the whole design on the other.

What works in Destiny or Division online titles doesn’t necessarily work in a story game like Cyberpunk 2077. And it doesn’t. In addition, the implementation of the entire loot system does not help. Collecting items is incredibly annoying in that you often have trouble picking something up at all, because the thing doesn’t want to be marked with the cursor. Other times, you may want to skip a piece of conversation with an NPC if you want to bend down for a rolled-up loot to capture it better, because these two actions share a key or a button on the gamepad, respectively.

Inventory management completes the whole nightmare in Night City with the fact that you can’t sell items together, for example by marking them as worthless, but nicely one by one. This is incredibly frustrating, and it only highlights the considerably unintuitive and slow interface, which is difficult to navigate. The fact that you will spend a lot of time here, CDPR game UI has completely gone awry and it is hard to believe that something like this has been approved in the final version.

Next-gen jen na PC

We are nearing the end of the review, where it is necessary to mention something for the form that you have certainly heard of. Cyberpunk 2077 looks fantastic if you have enough expensive hardware, which is also an idea that the Project RED CD gave us long before the game was released. However, if you are going to look at Night City on consoles, specifically PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, you will be shocked.

Forget about ray tracing and welcome a very shabby parade, which from time to time conjures up something handsome, but the redemption for it is a completely liquidated frame rate barely reaching 30 FPS. The liberation for consoles can be the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, where the Cyberpunk 2077 moves much better, but that’s just a weak patch for hot hype burns before release. CDPR has already apologized several times for the situation on the consoles, but that just won’t lead to a better gaming experience …

Cyberpunk 2077 is a huge disappointment. Not because it wasn’t a pretty decent game at its core, but because CD Projekt RED decided, despite numerous delays, to go leather on the market despite the warning signals she knew she knew. Corporate practices, criticized between the lines in the game itself, have sunk one of the most anticipated titles of recent years. But will the GOTY edition make open world and looter shooter mechanic design decisions? We are afraid not, and unfortunately our assessment reflects this fact.

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Rating: 65%

Manufacturer: CD Projekt RED

Platformy: PC, PS4, Xbox One

Tested on: PS4

Age: 18+

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