This was originally an essay critique that was modified to be a script, but the script is a lot better than the original essay so I'm posting it instead of the essay. If you want to watch the video so you don't have to read all of this, you can do so here Cyberpunk 2077 Critique (Excluding Bugs) - YouTube
Hello, my name is Maxine, welcome to my first critique, this isn’t my first review ever, but it’s the first time I’m actually trying to make something worthwhile. I want to start off with saying that it’s easy to criticize Cyberpunk. I mean, it’s release is such a mess, CdProjectRed obviously knew how bad the game was at release, and honestly it is far too easy to criticize the game in the state it’s in, so I’m going to be hopeful, and assume the bugs will be fixed, and will be excluding the bugs in this review, I will, however, be including things I believe will not be fixed, like the AI. Also, this is my first real experience with a CDProjectRed game, I don’t really have a strong opinion about their games, other than I didn’t like the Witcher 3, but that won’t affect this video at all.
Alright, I’m going to break this into a few sections, section number one will be gameplay and mechanics, then section number two will be story, and we’ll finish off with section number three, which will be my final assessment of the game. Now I’ll move onto the first section of the review, keep in mind I will be spoiling the game.
Let’s talk about the gameplay. The gameplay is basically you completing quests for people, it’s almost always just going to a place, taking out all the enemies, you grab an item, or person, and get out, and that consists of the majority of the content of the game. There are a bunch of interesting side quests that I enjoyed, but the majority of the missions in the game are the same copy pasted format that just gets boring after awhile. There are many ways to go about completing the missions, and I chose to be non-lethal, and I decided to do stealth, because I like playing stealth in games. Though, let me tell you, stealth in this game is not good, in fact, it’s quite the mess, this game has some of the worst stealth I’ve seen in any game. I had so many times where an enemy saw me through walls, but couldn’t see me when I was just to the side of them, I’ll get more into the AI later. The stealth is sometimes rewarded in the game, through objectives like, do not get detected, or do not raise the alarm, but the thing is that these rewards are always really bad, it gives you an extra 500 currency usually, which is a very small amount, and as I’m about to talk about, is a completely worthless reward.
Throughout the game you get a completely useless reward known as Eurodollars, which were nicknamed eddies. Eddies are basically the games currency, and the reason it is worthless is because there isn’t much worth spending it on, which is at first glance might seem to not be true, but I will back up my claim. You might think, hey, you can buy cars, clothes, guns, melee weapons, cyberware, and yeah you can, but why would you, it’s a huge waste of money. The game is basically a looter shooter, you kill enemies and they drop better weapons the higher level they are, you will be constantly swapping your weapons out, so why would you ever consider buying weapons. This is also the case with clothes, and melee weapons, there is just no reason to spend money on them when they get replaced so quickly, and as I’ll talk about later don’t even mention the crafting upgrade system. So what else is left? Well that leaves vehicles, and cyberware, technically you don’t need to buy any vehicles, because you start with one, though it takes awhile for the game to give it to you. Though, if you wanted to buy a cool vehicle, you still don’t have to, in the game you get many free vehicles, not just one, I have not bought a single vehicle in the game and I have 5 different vehicles, a few of which look really cool. There is no reason to buy a vehicle when one of the coolest ones in the game is free. These free vehicles are found by completing missions and one of them by exploring a mission area after the mission is over.
Which brings up the biggest reason why eddies are worthless, everything expensive in the game, the strongest items in the game, the best cyberware in the game, is all free. You can find almost all of the best cyberware out in the city, always in some kind of mission area, and the same rings true of guns, and clothes. So there isn’t a reason to buy anything, seriously why would I spend 100k eddies on legendary mantis blades or monowire when you can find both of those hidden in the city. So yeah eddies are worthless, and that is a bad thing, but the fact that you can find these items in the open world is actually a good thing, I like that kind of system, so that part is good, but the economy in the game is terrible. All expensive stuff is free, so there is no reason to spend your money on anything expensive, or well, just anything really, you might use your money a little here or there, but overall your going to be gaining a lot more than your spending, because there isn’t that needs to be spent on, so basically the reward for sidequests feels empty, it feels like a waste of time, sure you have a chance of finding something good in the mission area but you have to constantly be looking in every small location, and that get’s boring after doing it for a while. I ended my playthrough with over 300k eddies, 6 cars, mostly legendary cyberware, all legendary weapons, and I didn’t spend money on any of that, sure I spent eddies on some cyberware that costed 1k eddies, but that is such a tiny amount to spend on progression. Anyways, I think that’s enough for point, I’m going to move onto the next.
So now I’m going to talk about the skill system in the game. Cyberpunk 2077 has five attributes, and two to three skills per attribute and every skill has it owns skill tree. As per the usual, when you complete missions, or kill enemies, you get experience, now something interesting is that this game uses two leveling systems, not just one, you have the attribute system, where you level up an attribute by putting points into it, which you get from leveling up. Then you have skill leveling, which is basically a system where you level up the skill by doing the skill, you level quickhacking by quickhacking, you level stealth by doing stealth. When you level a skill sometimes it gives skill points and sometimes it gives buffs to the skill, when you level up overall it gives you an attribute point and a skill point. This system has been used before, and it can work, and honestly it works okay in this game, it’s not fantastic or anything, but it’s fine. The skill buffs are very small, and when you level a skill to level 20 it unlocks a special skill you can unlock, the problem with this is that almost all of the special skills are really bad. Why aren’t they special abilities, or something cool, they are all just small buffs that usually aren’t that useful. Leveling a skill to level 20 takes such a long time, I have over 80 hours in the game and I used stealth most of the time, and my stealth skill is only level 17, it takes far long to level up skills. Though, as I said, leveling them isn’t that important thankfully, but if someone were to level a skill to level 20, then they basically wasted their time, because the level 20 special skills are all bad. So there is no reason to level a skill to level 20. You actually don’t have to level up skills to purchase all but one of the skills, you have to level the attribute. There is also skill checks in the game, and I think they are neat, but it feels like there are more strength and engineering checks than anything else, which sucks, but honestly it’s not that bad. Overall the skill system is okay, which is fine, but I really enjoy good skill trees in games, but I won’t knock the game down at all because of it. Because fine is fine, it isn’t bad, or really good. Now I’m going to move onto how well the shooting is.
Okay so I don’t really have enough experience with shooting games, but from the experiences I have heard from many people who play the game, that the shooting is from mediocre to bad. Apparently there is an issue where your first shot misses, and subsequent shots are all accurate, and apparently it’s purposefully put in the game, because it is the type of shooting system they chose for the game. Only one person I know actually knew about this issue a lot, but a lot of people have mentioned how their shots feel like they just miss when they shouldn’t have. I had no problems with this, so if your like me, and don’t really play a lot of shooters, then you might be fine with this, but if you do play a lot of shooters, then you probably won’t like the shooting in this game. Other than shooting, the quickhacking is fun to do, especially if you have the more powerful ones. Another problem with the combat is the music, the music is fine it’s just hearing the same song over and over and over again is just bad, maybe add some variety. Okay so enemies are not tailored to your level, and instead are the level of the designated area, which can work but it feels very underwhelming in this game, some missions turn into a waste of time if you don’t do them right away, because they are too easy, though this is a problem in a lot games, I still think it’s worth bringing up. Overall I enjoyed the combat in the game, it does get boring after a while, much like most of the things in this game. Anyways, that’s all I have on that so I’ll move onto crafting.
Alright, so currently the crafting is very bugged, you can scrap items to get more resources than it costs to craft the item, but of course that’ll be fixed, and then crafting will be really bad. Upgrading weapons is very, very expensive, and the upgrade is very small, so basically upgrading your clothes, or weapons is next to worthless without cheating. There is almost no reason to upgrade your weapons or clothes when your going to be getting better ones from killing enemies anyways. There is also clothes and weapon mods, which are basically worthless until you get the skill that allows you to get mods back after scrapping stuff. I mean you can use them if you want to, it’s just the stuff you wear will get replaced, and you’ll lose the mods you put on the worse gear. Anyways I’m going to move onto the AI.
The AI, as I said before is full of issues, there cone of vision seems to go very high, there is also the issue that car chasing is broken, and likely won’t be fixed because they probably don’t see it as an issue. My biggest issue with the AI is that when combat mode activates, it seems as though it doesn’t end until everyone is dead, or at least, that’s the case most of the time, sometimes it works how it probably should, and when you hide combat mode ends, but the majority of the time, combat mode continues on for a very long time. One time I got spotted, --combat mode activated, so I got on a bike and ran away. I ran halfway across the city, and combat mode was still happening, it was just terrible, this is another thing I’m afraid they don’t see as an issue. Also when you’re in combat, enemies always know where you are, no matter what, you could have gone into a building, gone out the other side, run around the the outside of the area hiding around buildings, and they will still know your exact position, it’s overall really bad. Now I’ll move onto the open world.
The open world is full of secrets, as long as your in a mission area, it’s full of missions, people to help, crimes to stop, and once it opens, it’s huge. It’s also very pretty, so much of it looks very good. The one issue is there isn’t any fun to be had just messing around. The only thing you can do in the open world is with a joytoy, which is basically a prostitute, which is just stupid, there aren’t any fun games, or anything exciting. This is a cyberpunk setting, with awesome flying cars, huge buildings, and so many awesome locations, but there isn’t anything to do in the open world that isn’t just a mission. It’s just terrible, the city feels almost dead, sure there is Brandon, the talking vending machine, or that one guy who spews conspiracy theories, but that isn’t enough, the city should be breathing with stuff like that, but it has almost none of it. The city feels dead, like everything is just a worthless civilian, which by the way all feel lifeless, or a mission, or a shop. There isn’t anything interesting, they had so much potential, so many opportunities, especially with braindances. What if we got to play some awesome braindances, or some really cool virtual reality games? I mean anything would have added flavor to the game, but there is none of that. The open world is overall bad, lifeless, and there is no reason to be in it after you do the missions in an area.
Now let’s review, the skill system is fine, but overall pretty disappointing. The rewards for missions are terrible, and missions get boring after awhile, so there ends up being no reason to do them. Barely any of the side quests are good, but there are a few good ones. The gameplay loop is just the same thing over and over again, it never adds anything new or interesting. The AI is horrendous, and will more than likely never be fixed, because they probably don’t think it’s an issue. The AI is so much worse than I can ever explain here, I suggest watching other people’s videos on this to see just how bad it is. The shooting is, well, full of holes. The crafting is very unbalanced, and far too expensive. Money is basically worthless. The open world is dead, it feels like they didn’t put any thought into it. Honestly overall it feels like they didn’t put much thought into the game at all. Though maybe that’s a bit too critical. I’ll move onto my assessment of this section.
So finishing up with this section, I want to say this, even with all of the problems in the game, I still enjoyed the first 60 hours I played, I actually had a lot of fun playing it. These issues are really, really bad, but I had fun for a while. Though also some of the bugs in the game are partially why it was so much fun, because many of them are ridiculous. I don’t like rating games, because I never really feel like I can give a game a correct rating, but for this gameplay section it either get’s a five or six out of ten. Now it’s time to move onto the story, this will, well, spoil the story.
Okay so this section is going to be a lot shorter, because there is less to talk about, but I’ll try to be as thorough as I can. Not only will this section spoil Cyberpunk 2077 but it will also spoil parts of the Batman Arkham series, but most notably so Batman Arkham Knight.
So starting off, the game kicks off with a choice, a choice between being a streetkid, nomad, or corpo. Whatever you choose will give special choices and dialogue for the rest of the game, it isn’t that important overall, but it is a nice touch that I like, but I do not believe it is worth doing extra playthroughs for. Anyways I chose nomad, and I thought it was fine, I’m very new to critiquing so I’m not sure on how well the dialogue is, but I don’t think it’s terrible, I mostly think it’s mediocre, though after you get out of the start the dialogue get’s a bit better. Overall I liked the start, but I’m easy to please, I know that not everyone enjoyed it. In all the starts you meet Jackie, it’s pretty obvious he is going to die, the whole first few hours of the game is basically a huge tutorial, where only part of the city is open. Those first few hours actually took me about 8 hours to get through, because I wanted to do the side stuff first. You do a large heist, it goes wrong, which was very obviously going to happen, your blamed for killing what is basically a big bad guy, Jackie dies, and you put this relic you stole into your head. Then the guy who set up the heist kills you, and you come back to life. I’m not going to give the entire story, I’ll just give some parts and my thoughts on them.
Okay so I’m gonna start off with the relic business. So something I’ve noticed that pretty much no one else has, is that the whole relic stuff is just ripping off Batman Arkham Knight. I’ll give the rundown of what the relic is. The relic is a chip that is in the protagonists head, that is slowly killing the protagonists mind, and turning the protagonist into Johnny Silverhand. This is shown throughout the game by the protagonist doing things that Silverhand would do, showing that their personality is slowly changing, you also get to see johnny and talk to him, as he appears as a hallucination that comments on certain missions throughout the game. It’s a very interesting concept, and if it were original, I would have liked it. So now I’m going to spoil Arkham Knight. In Arkham Knight you play as batman, who in the story was infected with the joker’s blood, which is slowly turning Batman into the joker. In the game you get blasted with fear gas, and for the rest of the game the joker is a hallucination that talks to you. The joker makes comments while your doing missions, and acts as a very interesting part of Arkham Knight. Honestly, I think Batman did it better, mostly because they gave the joker a lot of voice lines, and in Cyberpunk Johnny barely talks outside of story missions, and main side missions. He appears a lot, but a lot of the time he doesn’t even say anything, and it is very awkward. Overall the relic part of the story feels like it was just stolen, so I don’t like it very much.
I’m going to move onto brain dances. Brain dances are very interesting, but they also feel very unoriginal. In a braindance, you basically watch a 3d video recording, that you can free cam fly around, and you can pick up details from the recording. A lot of people noticed that this was done in Detroit Become Human, and it was, but Batman: Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight did it first to my knowledge, and since the relic stuff feels stolen from that game, I feel as though it’s more likely they took it from the Batman series. But anyways, that’s two huge parts of the story just ripped straight out of the Batman games, so cyberpunk isn’t looking too good. though you could probably argue that the relic stuff is inspired by arkham knight, but it feels more copied than anything. Anyways, I’ll move onto the characters.
The characters are the best part of this game, I really enjoyed Judy, I also really enjoyed Panam, I also loved working with Takemura, he was a great character, and I was glad I saved him, even though he later told me to rot in hell. There were a few others, the most important thing is that this game has good characters. The romance options were fine, it’s neat but it’s not really amazing or anything, I think the most underdeveloped one is River’s, you get just two real missions with him and then your together, it was very quick and sudden, but honestly it’s not that big of a deal. Judy was the most fleshed out romance option in the game, and Panam came second in that respect, mostly because with judy you get a lot of missions to work with her, and it’s built up a lot more compared to Panam and River. I thought the voice acting was really good, though once again I’m new to this, so I can’t be sure, but at least, I really enjoyed it. Female V’s voice actor did a really good job, I wish there was more of a range of how she talked, something just doesn’t sit right for me there. I don’t know much about male voice V, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be a bit worse than female V, like seriously, he sounds like he’s trying to impersonate Jensen from Deus Ex, that’s sort of all I can hear, I really don’t like it. Now I’m going to talk about the story overall
The story is very predictable, I’ve read a lot of books, so I know how stories tend to go, and this one went in the exact direction I thought it would, nothing surprised me, or came out of the blue, most of the important things that happened were very obviously going to happen. I do think the heist mission was fun. I knew Jackie was going to die, but I was still sad about it. I liked the system of a character being introduced by the story, and you get to choose whether or not you get closer with them by doing their side quests. Overall the story is just okay, as someone who wants to be an author, I hope I never make something as predictable as this. What I really like in stories is when something new is introduced in some way, or at least if there isn’t anything new then do what is used really well, and in this game, that doesn’t happen, some of the story is done well, but those sections are very short, and such a small part of the game, there isn’t enough done well in the game for it to be anything better than just okay if not worse.
Alright I’m going to move onto the endings. The ending I got was very hopeful, with judy and I going off together with the Aldecaldos hinting at them finding a cure so V doesn’t die. It was an okay ending, it wasn’t fantastic, it wasn’t really well done, it was mediocre. The other endings seemed to be significantly worse than the ending I got, which I think it’s a little too easy to get a bad ending, I think that’s pretty unfair for people who chose different paths. Becoming a night city legend seems to be the second best ending, but seriously why would you want to give control to johnny at the end instead of finishing it yourself, that would have been lame. Then Hanako honestly seemed like the best option, because I didn’t want Panam to die, which she doesn’t but I didn’t know that at the time, but in the end I chose the Aldecaldos because I didn’t want to piss off johnny. Overall the endings are okay, it isn’t anything amazing, which really upset me because I was starting to become invested in V, and the fact the ending wasn’t very good was really disappointing.
That’s really all there is to talk about story wise, without going into everything. I feel as though I covered everything I wanted to, there is probably a lot more to say though. I covered the copying from the batman games, how Silverhand didn’t get enough lines, how I really liked the characters, and how the story was very predictable, and unoriginal. Overall the story gets a 6/10
Okay so now we are in the end of the critique, I had a lot to say about cyberpunk, and I believe I covered everything I wanted to, though there is still a lot I didn’t cover. Anyways, it’s about time I gave the game my full assessment, but first I will quickly go over everything I have mentioned thus far.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game full of AI issues, unoriginal ideas, bad writing, good characters, bad shooting, mediocre story, ok skills, really bad reward systems, gameplay that is fun at first but gets stale after a while, and honestly, I really don’t know if they stole the idea of the relic from Arkham Knight, but it feels like a very original idea, and it feels weird that they just so happened to have the same one for this game.
Overall Cyberpunk is a mediocre game that I enjoyed, because I enjoy mediocre games, I acknowledge I had fun with the game for the first 60 hours, partially because I had a lot of free time at the time, and partially because the glitches kept it interesting. Saying I had fun with the game does not mean I think it deserves an 8/10 or higher, I enjoyed the game but I’ve enjoyed really bad games before, because I have low standards for what I enjoy in games. There are too many problems to give this game any higher than a 6, it’s a very mediocre game, almost all of it is mediocre. I believe this game is a 6/10, enjoyable but disappointing overall, though if they fix the AI, which I don’t think they will, it will be a 7/10.
I know I said I wouldn’t talk about the bugs of the game, but they are pretty huge, so I will add this part. With the game being as glitchy as it is, with the situation of its release, the game gets a 3/10 in the state it’s in, and it’s in a very sorry state, just look at all the videos covering the bugs. This was my first proper critique, I’m still in college studying to get better at this, so I know it’s not perfect, but practice helps people get better so I’m doing this. I hope I didn’t upset anyone with this critique, it’s fine if you think the game should be rated higher, and I recognize that the game might change substantially in a few years, so maybe one day it’ll get that 8/10. If you enjoyed this critique, I’ll hopefully be making more of these eventually.