First off lemme be real a second with ya. I haven’t beaten it yet. Though I am pretty far into the meat of things. I tend to hold off my thoughts on a game until I have it done. This one, eh… I can call it now. Cyberpunk 2077 is okay. Sorry to disappoint in either direction, but it isn’t good or bad. It’s old as all hell. I will say that. Damn near a decade in development. You can’t just shake that off.

That was 8 years ago. Skyrim just came out for the first time. Batman Arkham City? Like the second one I think was big at that time. Witcher 2 was new, but I don’t care about the Witchening that much. It was a very different landscape for games back then. You didn’t have open world’s as interesting to explore as the titles today. Not to mention mission activation in open world games was rough. These are two big problems left over in Cyberpunk 2077. It’s big and pretty sure, but it’s cluttered with static objects. Trash bags as strong as cement line the streets of locked doors and stores that never open. Much like PS2 classic, Grand Theft Auto 3. Maybe Vice City if we are being nice. To which I mean like the driving controls are bad. Yet important, you gotta drive a lot. Night City is huge and where you need to go is often far across town. Plus racing and escort missions. It feels rather dated. I’d almost go as far to say it feels like an HD remaster of a PS2 game.

Now a lot of people are wrestling with glitches on PC and last Gen consoles like PS4. I can’t say I’ve experienced any of that. My PC is not super powerful. I’d say it’s right where most serious hobbiests have their spec at. Most of the stuff in it is 2 to 3 years old. GPU is like able to knock out a mix of High and Medium settings on most games. This one too. So I can’t comment on how it runs elsewhere. It’s not the kinda game I would have bought on console anyway. Fallout 3 and New Vegas always crashed on me. Fallout 4 non-stop frame dropped. I just don’t trust big open world games, not optimized for a system, to run on one. If someone was honestly expecting this game to work on PS4 you really need to listen up. Games are made to run on one platform, then kinda ported to the rest if it’s made to launch on multiple systems. So if you see it advertised on the xBox E3 stage then you can guess who got the most attention. That being the case xBox itself has like 4 versions of the xBox 1 which is it’s 3rd generation system. So they clearly went with PC as it’s base platform. These things are sadly important lessons to learn as game enthusiasts.

As for the story, it feels like a sequel to Johnny Mnemonic. It even had Keanu Reeves as Johnny a street smart excorpo street hacker. Add in a dash of Fight Club for reasons I should not go into as I haven’t finished the game yet and I could be way off on some of it’s finer details. Suffice to say it’s enjoyable enough of a plot if a bit thin and predictable. With no real consequences for acts if random violence against gangs and cops alike. Even Grand Theft Auto 3 had a reputation system to make certain groups more hostile to you based on how many you killed. This game uses Street Cred as a way to have you unlock black market stores and jobs. So like the more thugs you kill the more all thugs respect you. Not sure if that’s how gangs work, but I never claimed to be an expert on gang ethics. So it’s real strength is playing it like a sandbox. Walk around and find little sub missions or just kill some thugs. It is a good game just to mess around in for sure.

It has an upgrade system of interchangeable parts. Being cyborg techie cyberpunk people after all. So you can change everything up to be how you like it rather easily. It’s nice to have options. It really let’s you work the gameplay to your liking. So much so that when it does these numerous flashback scenes it gets annoyingly difficult for me because the character from back then, 50 years ago game time, it removes not only my upgrades, but also key gameplay mechanics because I guess the upgrades didn’t exist back then? Still though, if that’s your goal then make the sections either skippable or atleast watchable if you can’t beat them. I did beat them, but I didn’t enjoy it. I hate it infact because these flashbacks are legit memories you are watching. So it shouldn’t be possible to not do it. I guess I’m grumpy because the story overall isn’t gripping me. So when forced to do a fairly hard and moderately long section of all story exposition with no reward I could care less. Now before you get on me for saying I could care less you should know I mean it. The way I use that phrase is if I kinda care but not enough to pay attention. Again much like Grand Theft Auto 3 actually.

The Grand Theft Auto series is no stranger to bugs, glitches, and weak story telling. Yet I kinda love those games. Love, but don’t buy mind you. So I can understand the disappointment many gamers have with Cyberpunk 2077. My final thoughts on my not finished playthrough is that it’s well enough. It’s what I expect from a big name AAA title. Not what I expect from a ten year long passion project. As I see it the honeymoon was over. The passion faded and they started phoning it in. They got to “good enough” and pushed it out there. I would say it’s a bad move just well I’d be a hypocrite. So I say give it a shot. Is it worth $60? No, god no, no no no, not even remotely. It might be one day. Not today though, but that’s okay. It’s fun to watch a game crap itself if you go in expecting it. Like those cheesey bad movies some people can’t get enough of. Unlike a bad movie this one will eventually get better with patches and updates so if you really don’t like the glitches you can wait a bit and come back once it’s ready. Or just get a refund, that’s a thing. In the spirit of bad movies I must inform you to be quiet.