It’s Christmas Day 2020. Throughout the year the only game on people’s lips was Cyberpunk 2077, the hot new game from Witcher III‘s CD Projekt Red. What better game to ask for as a Christmas present from my girlfriend?
Then that release date rolled around and… well, I don’t need to go too deeply into one of the most humiliating debacles the industry has ever seen. By the time I unwrapped it I knew I wouldn’t play it for a while, but had I known that it’d be Spring 2022 when I finally peeled off the cellophane I may just have sold it for a quick buck.
But hey, waiting means I’ll get a slick, bug-free experience right? Plus the added grunt of the PlayStation 5 should plaster over some of the more egregious technical cracks. Cut to a few hours in and my character is tumbling through an infinite monochrome void. I guess Cyberpunk‘s problems go pretty deep huh?
To put it simply, even after 18 months of patches and tweaking, Cyberpunk still feels like a rickety house liable to be blown over by a mild breeze. Even if the physics engine works 95% of the time, the 5% it doesn’t (in which cars rocket into the sky or T-posing pedestrians float down main roads) makes this feel like a game held together with hopes and prayers.
Beyond that are numerous audio glitches (characters’ voices being inexplicably muffled or combat music getting locked onto the soundtrack), scripted cutscenes playing out in bizarre ways, and cutscenes spoiled by characters failing to interact with props. The best was when an ally climbed onto an invisible motorcycle and sped away into the desert, leaving the actual motorcycle standing behind them.
If it’s like this now, I shudder to think what it must have been like at launch. At least it doesn’t hard lock the console…
But the real tragedy is that even if you hack through this thicket of technical issues the game underneath just isn’t up to scratch. This is a first-person shooter with borked first-person shooting mechanics, even after extensively tweaking dead zones and controller sensitivity it never felt quite right.
The driving makes the snazzy neon cars feel like milk floats in disguise (admittedly the top-of-the-line sportscar is a little more responsive). Upgrade perks are shockingly uncreative (“wow, a 4% increase to pistol damage!” said no one, ever) and the enemy combat AI is rudimentary at best.
*deep breath*
And then there’s the story. After The Witcher III I was sure that whatever else happened Cyberpunk would at least spin a good yarn. But whatever this *gestures at a confusing mess* is so politically and socially disconnected from reality it’s impossible to relate to. The bedrock of good sci-fi should be in allegory or imagining the far-reaching consequences of a contemporary trend. But this tale of brain-jacking and personality engrams can essentially be boiled down to “corporations bad”.
I don’t want to harp on about this too much, but a barometer of how badly the core plotline fails is that they make you dislike digital Keanu Reeves. When the sight of Keanu makes you feel faintly annoyed you know you’ve screwed up.
Even the basic aesthetic feels clapped out. Much of the game rests on ‘cool’, though the designers’ idea of what that is was obviously mentally locked in somewhere around 1995. The result is a world designed by middle-aged men populated by people in their early 20s. Throughout there’s an icky sense of being “down with the kids”, which has a side effect of making the exploitative sexual elements icky rather than transgressive.
Having said all that, I did find some fun in Cyberpunk‘s ‘side gigs’. I suspect these were worked on by a different writing team – and I’m betting a younger and hungrier one. Most of these are fun ‘future shock’ vignettes and they’re a damn sight more interesting than the technogobbledegook going on elsewhere. Some of them don’t feature any combat at all, so practically everything I enjoyed about this experience was here. We can only hope that they let these writers at the eventual DLC.
There is some enjoyment to be had in Cyberpunk 2022 but you have to work to get at it. But, ultimately, this game feels like it’s rotting from the core outwards. Somewhere at the beginning of development some bad technical and design decisions were made and everything resting atop those foundations ends up skewed.
What’s left is a monument to hubris as colossal as anything Shelley could dream up. Perhaps the best lesson here is that no development studio is too big to not just fail, but fall flat on its face in front of the world.
Pixel Hunted 