- Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment , CD Projekt Red Studio
- Release Date: Dec 10, 2020
- Also On: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
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- Critic score
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Jan 27, 2021An exciting story and detailed world are overshadowed by an abundance of bugs, misogynistic writing and all-too-familiar game mechanics.
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Jan 22, 2021I’ve certainly had my share of fun and amazement soaking up what bits of Night City’s world that I could in my 80 hour playthrough, but nevertheless with a bad taste in the mouth when so many glitches and inconsistencies pulled me out of its overall experience.
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Jan 4, 2021There are good design elements all over, from a menu option disabling licensed music for streaming to quests that completely change based on whether you choose to go in guns blazing or stay hidden and make sense both ways. The main and side quests are all packed full of great story, the characters are fun to get to know… and yet despite all of the effort that went into this game, we also see the bad design choices I discussed above and an unplayable console version. If you can take the places where it’s a bad example and remember to do better in your own life, and maybe wait until it’s been patched into working, there’s an amazing game here that you can be glad you experienced.
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Edge MagazineDec 31, 2020V isn't the only one with two souls wrestling for one body. Cyberpunk 2077 ends up being a sometimes-unnecessary exercise in building a better merc, and a propulsive open-world tale about building a better life. If you can ignore the inconsistencies of the former and enjoy the latter, there's a lot to love in Night City. But if Johnny Silverhand teaches us anything, it's that two heads aren't always better than one. [Issue#354, p.98]
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Dec 23, 2020A truly excellent game hidden beneath layers of poor choices. There’s so much here to love, yet between the copious bugs, performance issues, and it ushering the player away from its very best features, it gets lost in the rubble...When played on PC, Cyberpunk 2077 is still an impressive, engrossing, and fun RPG despite its flaws. However, assuming that CD Projekt Red sticks to its word and fixes its problems, it has all the potential to be a genuine classic of its genre. As such, it’s difficult to recommend playing it at its worst, when its best could be something special.
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Dec 21, 2020The characters, stories, and aesthetics of Cyberpunk 2077 carry much of the weight of the experience. It’s hard to point to an open world so confidently sculpted with a singular vision for creating awe-inspiring vignettes at every turn. I won’t harp on about bugs this late into the discourse, but I think the other issues are more fundamental. The muddled themes, subpar combat, and shallow open world ecosystem are what keep Cyberpunk 2077 from achieving greatness, not some minor visual quirks. Still, if you believe in CD Projekt Red’s initial promise and want to see things for yourself, you could do worse than to spend your time in Night City.
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Dec 17, 2020Cyerbpunk 2077 ends up being a disappointment and a shame. The general lack of polish and technical problems make it difficult to fully enjoy a fascinating universe that, behind a pile of hypersexualized posters and an advertising campaign made by a teenager with revolutionized hormones, has moments of extreme reflection, tenderness, compassion and companionship. In the future, Cyberpunk 2077 will surely be a better product, but at the moment it should not even be for sale.
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Dec 17, 2020In its current state, Cyberpunk 2077 has a strong story and world, but those strengths are weighed down by bad design decisions and bugs aplenty.
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Dec 15, 2020Cyberpunk 2077 will ultimately be optimized for every platform and the major bugs will likely be squashed, but it's real problems will remain. A lack of gameplay and systems that matter leave the game feeling uninspired, even if some of the conversations and characters in this world are the best we've seen in quite some time.
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Dec 10, 2020Cyberpunk 2077 is a cynical look at a future, fallen America. The dystopian action-RPG boasts a deeply satisfying story, an engrossing world, and excellent shooting and melee combat, but it suffers from numerous bugs.
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Dec 7, 2020Your mileage may vary, but in our experience, the bugs are obtrusive and substantial across the board, often forcing us to reload saves or exit the game entirely. It's hard to get really into a world you constantly have to leave. But then it's hard to get into Cyberpunk 2077's world in general. So much of it is superficial set dressing, and there's so much happening all around you--ads going off at all times, gunfights breaking out in the streets, texts coming in about cars you'll never buy--that a lot of the game feels superfluous. The side quests and the characters they showcase are the shining beacon through the neon-soaked bleakness of Night City, and they give you room to explore the best the core RPG mechanics have to offer. These are what carried me through an otherwise disappointing experience.
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Dec 21, 2020Cyberpunk 2077 has something special deep inside it, but its ambition falls short, leading to consistent issues that hinder the game's positives. Some areas hit where it should for an RPG, but the lack of meaningful choices make the main and optional quests feel hollow. Maybe with bug fixes and content updates, we will see the true potential of Night City.
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Dec 21, 2020For better and worse, Cyberpunk 2077 is what it was always going to be: less a work of intensely relevant speculative fiction than a nostalgia piece for yesteryear’s vision of tomorrow.
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Dec 16, 2020Does Cyberpunk 2077 live up to the hype? Is it significantly deeper than Watch Dogs: Legion or Yakuza: Like a Dragon? Is it as good as Grand Theft Auto V? The answer to all of these questions is no. The sheer size of the world, its astonishing architecture, its set-piece battles, its stylistic bravado – all are testament to the efforts of a talented workforce. But you have to play by its rules, accepting Night City’s xenophobia and misogyny as unavoidable fictive components. Unlike Los Santos, this is not a multifaceted sandbox where you’re free to create whole new activities unforeseen by the designers. You’re there to do missions and side-missions, and the world only yields thus far. You’re always a tourist, never a citizen...In this way, Cyberpunk 2077 resembles a vast, futuristic Las Vegas. You come here and have a hell of a week, but then you wake up one morning feeling jaded and complicit, and you realise that the glitzy signs lead nowhere, the noise is meaningless, and when you look beyond the strip, there is only desert.
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Dec 7, 2020I think that Cyberpunk 2077 delivers the big-budget gaming thrills that many people are looking for. But it falls short in a few key areas for me, and a lot of that comes as a byproduct of its ambition.
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Dec 7, 2020After 20 hours or so, I'm excited to continue inhabiting the fascinating world of Night City and to discover more of its secrets as I meet its fascinating characters. But I'll be moving on prepared to turn a blind eye to some pretty big holes in that facade. [20 Hour Impressions]
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Dec 9, 2020An open-world masterpiece that's its own worst enemy at times, Cyberpunk 2077 still ranks as a modern-day classic...With more than 40 hours clocked over the last week – walking, driving, shooting, hacking and talking my way around Night City – it is my favourite game of the year and the best I've played since 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2.
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Dec 7, 2020A lot of people don't want to spend 50 hours playing one game, much less 200 hours to 100% it, and would rather a more linear, streamlined experience. Even with its shorter main quest, Cyberpunk is unlikely to sustain this type of player from start to end. But Cyberpunk 2077 isn't designed for that type of player. Anyone who's followed the game knows what they're in for. Players keen for a world to get lost in, a game to sink untold hours into, will be satiated by Cyberpunk 2077.
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Dec 7, 2020Honestly, it's a dilemma. Technical issues are often passing, but what lingers is the lack of readiness, in the wider sense. The lack of requisite care. The story is a marvel, as is the sheer, red mist hostility of the world that houses it. The promised depth of systems are there, but mishandled. The maturity - and recall CD Projekt describing Cyberpunk, on announcement, as "a mature RPG for a mature audience" - is often not. Maturity in the immature sense, maybe: the teenage idea of it, that 'maturity' equals Rated M and can be found in nakedness, coarseness, blood and guts, when in actuality it's closer to something like the forced perspective gained from time. My lingering impression of Cyberpunk 2077 is of a game that's shouting over itself, relentlessly at odds with its own creative voice. Amidst it all, the nuance that does exist in Cyberpunk 2077, the intense, intoxicating humanity at its heart, is so nearly engulfed by all the noise. But I think I can still hear it, just about. [Eurogamer Recommended]
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Jan 4, 2021Sure, it’s better on PC, but that’s cold comfort when it’s hardly functional on other platforms. What’s clear is that this game is no more ready for release than it is for review. Major patches are already slated for January and February, and we’ll revisit it at that time to score it. Right now, buyer beware. There’s a fun game underneath all this, but only if you are playing on PC or Stadia.
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Dec 7, 2020Jeff Gerstmann & Jeff Bakalar's early impressions.
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Dec 7, 2020On my PC, beefed up specifically for the game, Cyberpunk performs OK. I can work around the technical failings and laugh at or even admire the bugs. It’s only crashed once, hilariously, when another car hit me so hard the whole game mysteriously shut down. So I’m not playing the broken mess we’re all talking about. Instead, I’m playing a game whose various pieces don’t fit together, where busyness and choices feel like illusions to cover up its emptiness, where key features like driving and gunplay are a chore. I leave each play session a little befuddled and dissatisfied, but then I read about a quest or see a video of an unfamiliar area and boot the game up again. I can’t quite say if I like it, even though saying things like that is part of my job. I’m still playing it, but I’m not always sure why.
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Dec 7, 2020CD Projekt Red had the weight of the world on its shoulders, but Cyberpunk 2077 delivers. I can’t think of a single significant complaint. The game looks gorgeous, sounds luscious, and hits you in the feels just as hard as Witcher 3. The deep and incredibly flexible character customization options should provide ample replayability—something you couldn’t say about Witcher—especially when paired with the wide array of meaningful story decisions you can make. [Impressions]
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Dec 7, 2020I can’t deny that Night City wowed me with its scale, its verticality, and its sense of history. But I wish I could see people like me on its streets as something more than objects. I wish that the game’s politics were more radical. Yes, I know I shouldn’t look to a colossal game that was itself produced under exploitative labor conditions to lead the charge of anticapitalist liberation, but I wish the sparks of Johnny Silverhand’s ideological rage got to burn brighter, that Cyberpunk 2077 felt more interested in envisioning new futures than in reminiscing over bygone glories. Neither its gameplay nor its narrative can imagine the bold possibilities that I find so central to the best of cyberpunk. But what it does offer is visions of people trying to make do and get by in a world that’s trying to eat them alive, and sometimes those people get by with a little help from their friends. It’s not the revolution I hoped for, but it’s something.
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Dec 7, 2020Cyberpunk 2077 is staggering, overwhelming, and even surprising at times in its spectacle. Although my first dozen hours with the game has been marred by easy-to-fix problems, Nighty City, along with all it offers and all that call it home, makes for an intoxicating escape. Here’s hoping the next one hundred hours are as utterly compelling.
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Dec 17, 2020Cyberpunk 2077 is huge, sprawling, complex, and deeply flawed. It’s at its best as a fairly straightforward singleplayer action game, with likable characters and thrilling capers in a fascinatingly detailed open world that looks better than any game before it. It’s at its worst if you want it to be an RPG, an approach-as-you-please Deus Ex successor, or a polished piece of software. I enjoyed my time with it a lot, and I even want more of it, though I’m going to spend years complaining about its flaws. I’ll enjoy the complaining, too. It reminds me of the Eurojank games of yore, then, but maybe it’s fairer to say that it reminds me of the previous games from developers CD Projekt Red. After eight years of one of the most grating marketing campaigns imaginable, Cyberpunk 2077 is here, its ambitions beyond its means. Cyberpunk 2077: Enhanced Edition when?
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Dec 7, 2020CD Projekt Red's long-awaited follow-up to The Witcher 3 is brilliant, fascinating and engrossing but bears the scars of a tough development. [Review in Progress]
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Dec 7, 2020I’ve been cautiously excited about Cyberpunk 2077 for years, and it’s almost exactly the game I expected: not terribly memorable, but campy and entertaining. Given just how much crunch and controversy Cyberpunk 2077 has generated, though, I can’t deny being a little disappointed — especially when the game delivers fragments of something more compelling.
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Dec 7, 2020The expanding aura of decency and compassion that follows in V's wake makes Cyberpunk an unexpectedly charming game in spite of its chauvinist streaks and retro-kitsch. In the face of the thoroughly amok-machinery of techno-corporatism that has destroyed society and ruthlessly crushes any challenges and dissent that it might face, Cyberpunk 2077 wants to believe in a hero, and the promise of a neon sunset.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 21,666 out of 33230
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Mixed: 2,971 out of 33230
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Negative: 8,593 out of 33230
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Dec 11, 2020The best game ever. Game of the Year 2020. Masterpiece storyline and gameplay.
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Dec 12, 2020
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Dec 11, 2020