In the buildup to Cyberpunk 2077’s initial release in late 2020, I was cautious but optimistic. I loved The Witcher 2 and 3, and what I had heard of CD Project Red’s newest game sounded incredibly cool and exciting. A game based on a TTRPG I had heard of and always been intrigued by, being made by a developer with a proven track record, what could go wrong? As previews started to come out in the build-up to launch, I began to worry, and then with little to no information about the PS4 version, my optimism died. I ended up not getting it on release, which is something I had initially planned to do, and I ended up being so glad I changed my mind. It’s no secret that Cyberpunk’s release was a mess, almost unplayable on consoles from what I had seen, so I left it and figured it would just be a game I never played. Then a few years later, just after the DLC named Phantom Liberty came out, I started seeing comments about the game being fixed with this big new 2.0 update, and was actually good now, so I had a look and my interest was piqued again. I found the PS4 version on sale for a decent price and found out the PS5 edition was a free upgrade so I thought, why not, I will give it a second chance and see how it goes.
So Chooms, after spending 93 hours in Night City, what do I think? Is Cyberpunk 2077 preem now with its 2.0 update, or is it a game for gonks and a waste of eddies. Let’s find out.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world RPG, where you play as V, a mercenary trying to make his way in Night City. You start the game by creating a character, picking your starting stats, and picking a background that will start the story off. Personally, I chose Corpo and saw my Corporate intel guy get betrayed by his boss and then saved by his friend Jackie Welles. V uses this opportunity to start fresh and become the merc they were meant to be, picking themselves up and beginning to make a name for themselves. The story itself is an interesting one without getting into spoilers and what I thought was going to be a simple story of V climbing the ranks to become the top dog in Night City, quickly changed into something a lot deeper and more personal. I thoroughly enjoyed the core narrative shift to V’s struggle to stay alive when faced with losing himself, and I felt the story did a great job of introducing allies, enemies and new perspectives into the story.
I feel like the narrative itself though wouldn’t feel as strong without these characters’ presence, almost all of the side character’s V meets are so well written that it’s very easy to get attached to them. Most of the characters are written with a real sense of depth to them, and almost all of them charmed the hell out of me by the end of their individual questlines. even for characters, I didn’t think much of at first, like Kerry Eurodyne or Rogue. My only exception to this was River. His actual questline was one of my favourites, investigating a spree of kidnappings, but my god was he boring compared to everyone else. Besides River though I found all of the character-related sidequests and moments with them to be really interesting. You can romance certain characters depending on your V’s gender and preferences, and the relationship I formed with Panam was cute. I particularly liked that you would get random texts from them, asking how your day was or telling you what was going on with them, it made the relationships feel more natural and believable. I particularly like Judy, and her realisation about her depression and having to leave Night City, after everything she had been through it seemed like the right call for her. I also really enjoyed seeing Kerry’s journey from stepping out of the shadow he felt Johnny had left over him to do something new.
Without going into spoilers though, the best of these is Johnny Silverhand by far. His character was the star of the show, and it felt like it was him who got the most development depending on your choices throughout the game. His story and what you find out about his past and who he was is just great. Compared to V, who is mostly a gruff-sounding blank slate, Johnny felt like the real main character of the game, and Keanu Reeves did an excellent job voicing him. I had a great time in the missions where Johnny takes over and goes on his date with Rogue, or plays a final gig with Kerry and the rest of Samurai. I thought Johnny was an arsehole at first but the way his and V’s relationship progressed after visiting Johnny’s grave felt true to both characters.
One thing that I thought was a nice choice was how some of these sidequests open up different endings for you when you get to a certain point in the story. I feel like this would have added more work to a game that already needed a longer time in the oven at launch, but it would have been nice if some of the other characters got to affect the endings the same way Rogue and Panam do. The endings themselves were all very good though and one ending in particular felt like the “Good” Ending, even though I thought it would be a bad one, so that was a nice surprise. In the ending where V leaves the body to Johnny the events of the story seem to have a real effect on his persona, finally maturing him and giving him a second chance. I loved the little video calls that played in the credits and Rogue’s message to Johnny telling him to never come back felt cruel and real.
It’s interesting that a game that I thought was going to be about fighting corporations and rebellion, ended up being more about death and regrets, and I enjoyed this more personal story a lot more than I expected to. Though I enjoyed the story as a whole I did feel like the main questline itself was actually quite short, it didn’t feel like there were 26 different story missions. I’m not sure if the quests themselves weren’t very long, or it was a perception thing, but it felt like it didn’t take much time to get through them.
Like in all open-world games, Cyberpunk has a myriad of side activities and these unfortunately are a real mixed bag. As I just said, all of the side gigs about V’s friends are fun to do, and touch on a range of themes and story beats that I found interesting, amusing or heartwarming. In fact, almost every Side Job that has a yellow Icon is great. There was one side mission involving a Politician running for office, which was amazing. I didn’t see the route this side story took coming at all, and it left me thinking about the concepts the game had touched on for a few days after. Unfortunately, these are the minority of the quests in the game.
The bulk of the side content is the Night City Police missions, where you run into a small group of between 3 and 15 gang members, kill them all, pick up an item and then leave. You will need to do all of these as part of your journey for the platinum trophy, and it’s a real drag. There are way over 100 of these dotted around the map, and I felt like the bulk of my time with the game was cleaning these up. The game isn’t necessarily difficult at all, so this just felt like pointless busy work. Other side gigs are a little bit more complicated, like sneaking in somewhere to pick up an item, hack a computer or kill a specific target, and some of these have bonus objectives too which help them feel a little different, but again there are so many of them it felt like a real chore to do.
Luckily, the tedium of these sidequests is relieved some by how good the game feels to play. You have lots of choices in how to build your character, with there being 5 main stats you can invest in, Body, Reflexes, Technical, Intelligence and Cool. Each of these have different skills attached to them that you unlock with Perk Points you earn that increase your options.
In my run, I played through focusing on Technical and Reflexes, with some body and Intelligence on the side. Technical allows you to equip more cyberware, which in turn gives you more armour or abilities, so it seemed like the best stat overall. It let me really stack on the high-level cyberware by the end of the game, including equipping some dope Mantis Blades that set people on fire, legs that gave me a double jump, and the Sandevistan which was a cyberware item that temporarily slowed down time. I did mess around with Intelligence though and the quick hack system you can use on your enemies and this was really fun to abuse. You can use these quick hacks to detonate grenades that they are carrying or knocking an enemy out from a distance. I didn’t mess around too much with the skills for Body or Cool but I saw skills related to stealth, and throwing knives and LMG skills which sounded like it could have been a good time. These Stats also affect some of your options as you move through the world. Having a high intelligence skill can let you hack terminals for extra cash or crafting materials, and having a high body stat can let you force open doors that would be locked, or open new dialogue choices so it always felt like your build mattered.
Graphically Cyberpunk looks fantastic, the character models are great and there seemed like a nice variety of NPC and car models as you walked around the city. Emphasis on “walked” though, I did notice when I was driving around the city at speed, the game struggled to keep up with generating different NPCs, so I would see a lot of repeating models in a short period, and very few cars on the road with me. There were also some weird bugs and glitches I found. Usually, nothing game-breaking, but NPCs and enemies getting stuck in random geometry, or just bugging out and doing nothing while I shot them was pretty common. There were a few times I got stuck on something and stopped being able to move and one time I was standing on a crate that I fell through and had to restart the game. The worst was an enemy body rag-dolling and getting stuck in a doorway that closed, his body warped so much it made me laugh, but then the framerate tanked to about 5fps. This stayed this way until I reloaded my save from before the enemy died.
Night City itself is gorgeous, when it wants to be, and an ugly mess when it wants to be, and I mean this in the best possible way. The towering skyscrapers of the Corpo Plaza, and its beautiful park areas around it are amazing to look at, while the dingy back streets of Santo Domingo feel like another world completely. It sounds weird to say but I loved the mountains of trash in the badlands against the horizon of rusted and dilapidated Wind Turbines. It’s amazing to drive around and just soak in the atmosphere of the place. It is such a well-realised sandbox to play in and explore and I always felt like I was seeing, or hearing something new.
There are certain places in video games, where the location almost feels like a character in itself, more than a setting. Midgar from FF7, or the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil are great examples of this, and Night City feels the same to me. It has so much character to it, from its crazy billboards advertising things like drugs, sex, or fancy new cyberware, to its hidden backstreet markets full of sex workers and gun vendors. The weather effects that you can encounter while exploring all make the areas feel and look different too, thick fog or disgusting yellow smog sometimes fills the areas. There are moments when you are just walking around at night when it is covered in fog or raining heavily and all you can see are the neon lights of signs through the fog, and it looks and feels like a real city.
The environmental storytelling of Night City is really well done and I feel like the dystopian future it envisions is both incredibly cool and a hauntingly stark idea of what the future could be when uncontrolled capitalism runs amok. The irony of these messages being given by a corporation that made their dev team crunch to get this game out is not lost on me but it is in keeping with the tabletop game roots as far as I know. There are random shootouts between the gangs and the police, and so many enemies drop shards, which are little text logs that help flesh out the world around you. It makes me wonder how much of this is based on the adventure modules of the Tabletop Game, and after I finished the game, it did make me want to have a look and see how easy the game is to pick up and play.
So all that remains are earning the trophies, and what you need to do to earn the platinum trophy “Never Fade Away”. There will be some spoilers ahead but I will try and keep them to a minimum.
There are 6 Main story trophies, and then 4 different ending trophies. These are all missable however as they rely on having completed the companion quest trophies for Panam and Rogue. For Rogue’s quest, you need to be nice to Johnny when you visit his grave to try and become his friend, then call Rogue to go on a date. For Panam, you need to just successfully complete all three of her quests. These will earn you Bushido and Chill, and Life of the Road Respectively. You will also need to go back to save Takemura when you are attacked after the parade. When you get to the end of the game there is a conversation on a balcony which gives you options, Trust Arasaka for the Devil Ending trophy, Go with Rogue and let V live for The Sun Trophy, or Call Panam and Let V live for The Star, or Let Johnny live for Temperance.
There are also missable trophies for the sidequests for Judy, Kerry and River. For Judy just make sure you don’t betray her when given the opportunity. For Kerry, go with him for coffee when he asks you to; for River’s; scan every clue in the Braindance section of his investigation. Nothing too difficult here.
There are a few miscellaneous trophies to keep an eye out for as you play that rely on specific Cyberware being installed, but again these aren’t too difficult. One of these, called V for Vendetta, is for killing the enemy who killed you within 5 seconds of being revived by the Second Heart ability. I actually unlocked this in the tutorial by accident as I think you can’t die there, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get once you have bought the Cyberware for it. Another called The Quick and the Dead, you need to kill 50 enemies while in slowed time. The Sandevistan Cyberware will let you slow down time by pressing L1 and R1 for a short time and then the ability needs to recharge before you can use it again. You should also use this time slow down ability to shoot a grenade that has been thrown at you for the trophy Gunslinger. Next, there is the Rough Landing trophy, which requires the Berserk cyberware, while this is activated you need to jump from a height and perform a superhero landing that kills or incapacitates 2 or more people at once.
Lastly are a few trophies involving quick hacks, which need a cyberware deck that allows you to use them. You need to use the Detonate Grenade quick hack on someone and have that grenade kill at least 3 people for “Demon in the Shell”, and you will need to use the Distract Enemies quick hack 30 times without being caught.
There is also a trophy called Christmas Tree Attack, which involves getting a minimum of 3 demons uploaded in a Breach Protocol minigame. This is also not too difficult if you raise your intelligence stat to at least 5 and buy the perk to give you more inputs. Also the minigame is really fun to figure out the puzzle and pretty lucrative when you need cash or quick hack crafting parts.
Next, there are the miscellaneous combat trophies that don’t rely on any specific cyberware. You need to kill 300 enemies with Ranged Weapons, and 100 with Melee weapons. You need to kill 2 enemies with the same Sniper Rifle shot, which is easy to do with a Tech Sniper Rifle, which allows you to charge the shot before you make it. While using a Pistol or Revolve, kill 3 enemies in quick succession while in close combat for the Gun-Fu trophy and lastly kill an enemy that threw a grenade at you for Right Back at You. None of these are difficult or time-consuming and you are likely to get most of these just in normal gameplay.
The last few random trophies are for having cyberware equipped in every body part available, for Full Body Conversion, use dialogue options that are related to your background in conversation 10 times, which I think is technically missable but you do get a lot of opportunities to do this. You will also need to craft three tier 5 Items. This was pretty easy as you get so much loot. Just don’t sell anything and dismantle it instead in the crafting menu then use the crafting materials to upgrade tiers til you get to Tier 5 materials, and use them to craft whatever you want.
You also need to reach max street cred, which you will do on your way to clearing out all the side missions easily, and buy every car from the autojocks. You get a lot of money from the story and side gigs and you can also craft and sell quick hacks for a lot if you need more. The Ten out of Ten trophy is for maxing a skill level. Skills level up separately from your stats depending on your playstyle. If you use get kills with Swords, or SMGs for example it will raise your Shinobi Skill. If you use a lot of quick hacks it will raise your netrunner skill. Getting one of these to the max level of 60 can take a lot of work, and I had to do about 3 hours of kill grinding to get the skill to the max level after I finished the game. If you want to avoid this, pick a weapon type associated with the skill you want to max and stick to it for every mission possible and you won’t need to grind as much. There is also one other missable trophy for collecting all of Johnny Silverhand’s clothes. One of these is missable as you can leave the apartment in the side gig “Psycho-Fan” without grabbing the clothes. Getting all of them will get you the trophy “Breathtaking” which is a lovely reference to Silverhand’s actor.
Lastly, then, you will need to get 100% completion of the map. This is a real grind and I found a lot of it to be repetitive and boring. You will need to do every single NCPD event, as I mentioned earlier, but you will also need to do every cyber-psycho mission, every side gig, find every tarot card graffiti, and find every fast travel point. I think this part alone took me the bulk of my 90+ hours in the game. There are 9 trophies related to these though, and most of them are related to clearing out each district of side missions, so it’s best to just focus on one area at a time between main missions.
So with all said and done, Cyberpunk is a game that I am in two minds about. When I look at the game from a trophy hunting perspective, and the monotony of some of its side content, and the sheer amount of dross there is, really soured my experience of the game, and there wasn’t any sense of elation after earning the trophies for clearing out each district, more a sense of relief. However, when looking at the main content, with its great story and interesting characters, and the incredible world around them, I did find that I was enjoying the game. I was curious if playing the game would convince me to buy and play Phantom Liberty and it definitely has done that, and I would say I recommend the game, perhaps not as a full-price title, but one to pick up on sale.
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