Cyberpunk 2077… But the dystopia is the game – a layman’s review

Being a fan of cyberpunk, sci-fi and other futuristic settings , I was curious as how Cyberpunk 2077 would be. It had been talked about for years, and even an easter egg in the Witcher 3 alludes to it’s development. Well I decided to try it out on the PC as I thought it would probably run better . My PC runs other heavy titles with no problem.

So we start out with the nice intro videos. Things look pretty good so far. The game prompts you to choose a path : Nomad ( a wanderer), Street Kid ( gang member ) or Corpo ( corporate business).   I chose Street Kid as I thought it might be fun to be a brawler style character and start in the city .

Next is the character customization part , where I get customize my V character . Now this has been probably the most hyped part of the game, as developers were talking earlier this year and last year about how you could customize the character, give the character genitals, hairstyles ect.

So let’s get into that.

Well the customization was a bit of a let down.  Lip’s were pretty limited, eyes were all very similar, with a few exceptions of heart pupils and swirls ( I think Code Vein may have had that already), piercings were pretty limited, as was makeup. You can add scars but not really any wrinkles . Freckles are up. I was really baffled as to way you couldn’t make you face bigger or smaller, also noses were pretty basic. 

I feel like Skyrim even as goofy as it could be sometimes had a bit more fun with it’s facial customization than this game. As well Grand Theft Auto’s very own Carl Johnson from San Andrea’s was bit more revolutionary as you could make buff, fat, skinny, or buff thick. And no height adjustment either, which I have seen in other rpg’s and games such as Phantasy Star Online. This may just me being picky but I really thought this character would be more customizable. I will say they do give you quite a bit of nail selection, and there are a lot designs just for nails. Also I feel like the colors for hair and makeup was super limited . There is no color wheel , or slider to add depth , tone or shading . So all your hair colors are pre colored with no way of customizing it .  As for skin tones , I feel like they all seemed to have a green tinge to it which was odd . 

 

Beautiful nails and heart eyes!

 

The nudity bit of the game, is also I feel kind of there just to give the game an edgy feel but doesn’t really contribute much nor is there that much selection either. For a cyberpunk game , I felt like there could of been like nipple piercings, and maybe more options. You can mix and match or just be a Barbie or Ken doll . And even add some patches of hair down there . Same with the chest options , you get two choices , and some nipple options .But I was surprised with a lack of piercings, like if you’re going to add stuff like nipples might as well do fashion oriented things as well . So definitely kind of lackluster for a futuristic game creator.  But well at least my nails look good . 

Voice selection was also pretty limited , with only two options where as a game like Dragon Age Inquisition (2014) you had 4 different voice actors to choose from that were male and female .  DA Inquisition also had a better character creator to be honest too . 

So now that I made my character ( she looks a bit like Jolyne Kujo from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure ), it’s off to go on Cyberpunk adventures!

Well I would if I could leave the bar !  And apparently 1 million other players can’t leave either . Many are having the same issues or worse. 

Right after character creation , our Character V is in a Grungy cyberpunk bar . I can talk to the bartender, a few other npcs , one of them gives me a mission , and my first mission is to leave the bar. And thats when the game crashes . I tried many times restarting the game , tried to sneak past door and still I get the same result . My game crashes . I made sure that no other programs were running on my computer , still crashes . So I go on google and look up bugs for Cyberpunk 2077 and see many message boards with many people having the same problem . People trying to start the missions have their games crashing . No matter what path they choose . I also chose the Nomad path in a later playthrough, this path also crashed after the cutscenes, of course as expected. But hey the driving was fun, and desert was nice. Plus I smuggled an iguana across the border. So Nomad was a bit more fun than the street kid stuck in the bar.

My car got stuck inside a plastic lawn chair!

The Chair was too powerful!

the awkward silence and animation is disturbing and endless… just what is he doing?

My Nomad life 

Nomad:Definitely can’t leave their cars always on the road.

Street Kid : stuck in the bar life 

Corpo: Can’t leave the office like a workaholic , it’s actually not because of realism , it’s just bad coding , causing unplayable game crashes !

I did keep trying as the game does look fun even if it was overhyped and maybe undercooked . I decided to stay in the bar and evaluate my surroundings. Maybe I could start a fight as I’m a street kid . Nope no fights , no actual real dialogue either . This is a dystopia but not the kind we were looking for . 

Inspecting the bar walls I noticed the TVs on wall were horribly rendered, in comparisons with Grand Theft Auto’s Impotent Rage tv programs . This was just sad . Also the NPC’s in the bar were very dull and lifeless . A lady would drink a beer or soda and the bottle would glitch her inside her head . It was a bit disturbing. I noticed no collision factor throughout the game except for my character’s own collision factor . For example three characters can be seen stuck inside each other . It’s a bit wonky . Also noticed the same character models in the same bar . Textures on certain characters were really bad , with one lady looking more like a Barbie doll with a plastic neck and badly rendered tattoos.  And this was ultra quality graphical settings . 

Some of the table surfaces on the bar looked okay and nicely rendered but I disliked how I couldn’t touch or pick up things in my environment . Yes it is just a bar but I should be able to grab bottles , throw trash at people . There were some vending machines with items but those quickly went into inventory when you accessed them . It has a bit of a dollhouse feel to it . I find it strange that many older games had more interactive environments and objects than this new much hyped game . Unlike games from 2004 you cannot play arcade games or buy hot dogs, I miss CJ.

You’ve seen two headed turtles but have you seen a two headed cowboy?

I do hope they release a subsequent day two patch on pc for all the people who waited for so many years as the day one patch was a complete failure on the developers end and renders the game completely unplayable for what looks to be millions of users across the world.  It seems the Playstation 5 has the most stable version and most all older consoles are seeing an enormous struggle with emersion due to all the glitches, fragmentations, crashes and of course tip slip. My advice would be to put off buying this for at least 3 to 6 months if you are interested in this game, that will give the studio enough time to correct the errors and allow for a truly immersive user experience with all the sparkle and glitter that they promised but sadly left out.

At the end of the day bottom line I’d love to play a fully perfected version of this game but its a far cry from a finished product.

 

specifications for testing include ps5 and pc running win10 24gb of ram 12 cores 24 threads at 3ghz standard clock with an EVGA gtx 1080ti series graphics cards ran on low, med and high settings respectively. All drivers updated,  os fully setup, game removed and reinstalled and many hours of debugging. 

Update: 12-12-2020 downloaded and patched the game with the day two patch (hotfix 1.04) and it still crashes in the same way which is very disappointing.