There’s plenty of debate to be had about Cyberpunk 2077’s level of immersion and the overall quality of the open-world experience, but it’s hard to question the sheer amount of content in the game. Yet there’s a definite trade-off involved here: while you’ve got a ton of optional activities to keep you occupied in the open-world, the main storyline is way shorter than the one in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, at maybe 30-50 hours (rough estimate). It’s not dissimilar to an amusement park ride that ends way too soon.

And for all the hoopla with the ability to pick your character’s lifepath, you’d think they would play a larger role in the story. It turns out that they matter for all of about ten minutes of backstory before you get unceremoniously dropped into your new life as a mercenary. After that, the paths are only good for extra dialogue options and an incredibly minor quest. 

Still, Cyberpunk’s story ends up being an enjoyable one filled with (bugs, but also) a well-rounded cast of memorable characters that sees you sneaking or blasting your way through the districts of Night City. Keanu Reeves hamming it up as the legendary rocker Johnny Silverhand needs to be mentioned here as one of the best (but occasionally worst) things in the game. 

While you can rush through Cyberpunk’s story, you’ll end up missing a huge chunk of the game, like side jobs. These are the shorter, smaller-scale nitty-gritty stories that add quite a bit of local flavor: stuff like boxing (more on this later), street racing, character questlines (each major character generally has a series of quests) and other wacky (sometimes downright disturbing) stuff you happen to come across.

Then there are gigs, which are side-side jobs that you can run into by either exploring the open-world (hah!) or going to the yellow “?” areas on the map. These are parceled out to you by fixers [the middlemen or middlewomen that control a district] and usually involve assassinations, stealing/planting stuff, or rescuing NPCs. Standard filler.

One of Cyberpunk’s many skill trees

There’s a lot of freedom in how you want to build your character, with skill trees for every major player archetype. There’s a tree for rifles, a tree for pistols, a tree for melee fighters, etc. 

I typically play stealthy sniper-types in shooters, and initially approached Cyberpunk the same way – unfortunately, snipers are what you’d call “complete garbo” since most sniper rifles can’t be silenced and do pathetic damage considering their fire rate and reload time. And toggling the scope lagged my PC. So, early on, I swapped the rifle for a silenced revolver and proceeded to wreak havoc on enemies. It worked well, maybe a little too well.

Once I got myself a decent Cyberdeck [think of it like a spellbook for netrunners, where you can equip various quickhacks aka spells], combat became a huge joke. No more was I some lowly gun-for-hire gonk named V, no- I was now V, Master Hacker Cracker Extraordinaire. I literally marked enemies and browsed Reddit on my laptop while they burned to a crisp (figuratively, “non-lethal”).

This is because quickhacks have insane range and deal damage based on your level, and also don’t trigger combat (kind of stupid). Sure, there are some utility hacks that might have been helpful in a game with smarter enemies (like being able to jam an opponent’s weapon or making them move to a specific spot), but when you’ve got stuff like Short Circuit and Overheat that can take down an enemy in one rotation from long-range stealth, why bother using anything else? It’s like playing a stealth archer in Skyrim except you don’t even need to aim, just roughly mouse over a bad guy and pick an option from a menu.

I found it interesting how there was no real way for enemies to deal with quickhacks, and how few enemy netrunners are actually in the game despite it being the most overpowered form of combat in Night City. Corner-cutting 1, QC 0.

And this brings me to one of the sadder parts of the Cyberpunk experience, watching the enemy AI (and I use that term loosely) do the same crap over and over again: find a body, say something idiotic, then walk around randomly. Rinse and repeat. I’d hoped that by now, enemies could be at least show a bare minimum of fake intelligence and not just go around being controlled by if-then statements.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that you can customize your character’s appearance down to their pubic hair and other “interesting” bits. Interestingly enough, you can mix and match body types with different voices and types of genitalia. I’m not joking.