Summary: Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure story set in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour and body modification. I’m ready to escape the years of being told what Cyberpunk is and find out what it is for myself, as I imagine many of you reading are too. The snippets of all this that we saw pre-release made many potential players, myself included, anxious about how these identities would be deployed in the game. I’ve cobbled it all together with a hefty amount of simply exploring, as well as completing a handful of gigs and over 30 side and main quests. Some moments have been exciting or moving, while others have just felt like stuff to do. All this incentivized me to go off the beaten path, slowing down my story progress but compelling me to explore Night City. This comes up a lot in the review. A ton of work has clearly gone into them, and they’re a joy to read. This is the video game equivalent of Avengers: Endgame. Cyberpunk 2077, the most recent game from Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, was first announced in 2012. We’ll see what it turns out to be for me, and I’m curious to find out what it turns out to be for you. From what I’ve seen so far, Cyberpunk seems content to use race mainly to give groups visual or linguistic markings, without considering these identities very deeply. Initially, this was all bewildering. When facing a mission with a gate I couldn’t open, I used an attribute point to raise my stats so I could. You play as V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. CD Projekt Red has added another inimitable RPG to its library, one that you could easily sink tens of hours into over the course of many months, eking out every hair-splitting detail. But there’s some heart in it too. I haven’t fallen in love with playing Cyberpunk 2077, but I haven’t loathed it either. The game isn’t some kind of warning about the future; it seems to take as a given that the world will descend into a money-obsessed techno-dystopia, with how people let things get this way a lesser concern than how they can make a living in their reality. There are queer people because everyone in the game’s world indulges their sexual desires to their fullest. On the one hand, I’ve heard versions of this conversation play out between cis and trans women in my real life, and had versions of it myself as a trans man with cis men. A Day One patch is coming which should iron out some of the creases, but given there are hundreds of clothing items and specific animations for pulling a laptop out from under a bed, keep your expectations tempered. The main questline acts as the reliable spine of Cyberpunk 2077, introducing cool characters and providing structure to the open world, coaxing exploration in the same inoffensive way that Skyrim does. At the most basic level, this made no sense: performing medical procedures on a rando is certainly a complicated, expensive way to screw with them in a world where most people seem to live in poverty, despite, as one book told me, an 80 hour work week being considered a good option for people with families. Cyberpunk 2077 is an ambitious and deeply enjoyable RPG that evokes comforting comparisons to the good old days of Fallout and Deus Ex. The dialogue can sometimes be ridiculous: I cracked up when, in all seriousness, a character told me they would send me the “detes” about an emotionally-charged situation. In many ways, it feels like it’s about itself—its genre and source materials, the work that went into it, the flexibility it wants to give the player—from its character creator to its in-the-moment play. For now, I like the somewhat slow pace. There are various commerce hubs where you can do things, but many of its bars, hotels, and shops are just window dressing. Personally, the trans content I’ve seen so far didn’t deeply offend me, but that’s my own stomach for such things. It’s a moment that skirts close to acknowledging the cyberpunk genre’s fetishization of East Asian cultures, but it’s fleeting. Like Night City itself, I let the whole thing wash over me, giving up on planning a build and putting my points into whatever I needed at the time. As V levels up in Cyberpunk 2077, they will face threats both physical and cyber. For instance, I haven’t yet encountered much of the Voodoo Boys gang, whose roots in the tabletop game involve white people culturally appropriating Haitian culture. The game is divided into a prologue and three acts, and I’m currently somewhere in Act II, juggling multiple main story quests and a jaw-dropping abundance of side activities, simultaneously about to meet with a street gang, plan next steps with a character bent on revenge, and do various personal quests for characters I’ve met. Rather than picking between “male” and “female,” you choose a traditionally male or female body type and choose between two penis types or one vagina. There’s an admirable diversity of races, sexualities, genders, and body types, but they feel like a veneer. Much of what I’ve seen, though, has been a turnoff, a sign of a game that might be desperate to be edgy. You will receive a verification email shortly. While the flashing lights and colorful non-player characters give the feeling of a living city, it’s also a little empty. The sexualization of the world feels juvenile. We kept saying we’d crack on with the main missions in the interest of completing the game quicker, but every time we finished one, we’d get dragged away into a four-hour desert stupor of superb side quest after superb side quest. Verdict so far: Thirty hours in, I’m not that invested in the stakes of Cyberpunk’s main plot. There’s a black market traffic in sexual and snuff Braindances, because of course there is. It also doesn’t feel like enough to make me love the game as unabashedly as I love The Witcher 3. It might be a missed opportunity to use the game’s main story to say big things, but I’ve also enjoyed exploring it at my own pace, learning about the game’s politics and history by digging into the crevices of its map rather than having the story tell me what to think of them. In the themes and subtext department, the game is often at odds with itself. As for race and ethnicity, I haven’t yet seen every depiction in the game. Cyberpunk 2077, the most recent game from Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, was first announced in 2012. As my colleague Ian described in his preview over the summer, you have five main stats—body, intelligence, reflexes, technical, and cool (which dictates stealth)—each of which have various skill trees attached. When you get your hands on the game, the scale of Cyberpunk 2077 will no doubt make you anxious. They’re the most fun when I stop trying to understand exactly what’s happening and just go with them, hacking, doublecrossing, and Braindancing as my mood and companions dictate. While the cyberdeck’s RAM and buffer and slots and quickhacks all felt like a bunch of irrelevant nonsense that could have been explained more simply, they offer an exciting range of possibilities now that I can afford them and see them in action. In-game, a TV ad for the show used “he” to refer to the character, which surprised me when I overheard it. Hi-jinks ensue! Assume the role of V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. Unfortunately, that also means harboring the long-dead spirit of Keanu Ree-, sorry, Johnny Silverhand, a washed-up rockstar terrorist who is slowly taking over their mind. My V has a vagina and goes by “he,” but the game doesn’t seem to acknowledge that he’s a trans man; characters occasionally make reference to his dick or balls, though this could just as easily be metaphorical. We played as a Nomad hacker with a teal undercut and custom heart-shaped pubes. (You can also craft gear with the requisite parts, blueprints, and perks that unlock higher-level crafting.) Video games made $152 billion. Leveling up athletics gives you increased stamina and carrying capacity. The game’s main systems are overwhelming. Verdict so far: In a deeply 2020 way, I’m both disappointed and relieved by this. They’re color, ultimately. I might not have the street cred to buy the best weapons or the cyberware to double-jump and shoot arm projectiles, but I can whittle down enemies with my sniper rifle, hack into the security system to open a door, then finish the stragglers off at close range with the homing shots of the “Smart” technology shotgun, using a cyberware implant I have. Even when The Witcher’s fantasy jargon turned me off, I empathized with the people struggling to survive on The Continent, and it made me think about my own life in new ways. I’ve enjoyed some characters, but they haven’t been as relatable as The Witcher’s. I’m middle-of-the-road on it so far—having fun in spots, left wanting the game to be more like what made The Witcher 3 great in others. It also doesn’t feel like enough to make me love the game as unabashedly as I love The Witcher 3. In terms of Cyberpunk 2077 combat, ... it looks like Cyberpunk 2077 will be, too. One in-game and real-life night, I took V back to his apartment to go to bed before going to bed myself, only to get sucked into a real-world half-hour of watching news and commercials on V’s TV, marvelling at the world-building and details as much as the welcome mind-numbing effect of zoning out in front of the TV. New York, But I’m not necessarily interested in knowing what a game studio thinks about my existence; I don’t need Cyberpunk—or any game—to tell me about myself. You’ll also need money to buy body augmentations called cyberware and new abilities, called quickhacks, for your hacking implant, called a cyberdeck. There are many parts of it that are as over-the-top and off-putting as its pre-release marketing. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Cyberpunk 2077 - PlayStation 4 at Amazon.com. But there are hints of something here, surely motivated by my love for The Witcher as well as what’s in the game itself. Other times they’ll be more about hacking. And while there are a lot of NPCs on the street, most of them just wander around and give short quips of dialogue when you knock into them. It’s a shame, but there are plenty of other interesting side characters with better arcs that you’ll get to know throughout the game. Or compared to another game; where does it fall on the Dragon Age scale. My character currently has a total level of 16. As you level, you also earn attribute points, which are put into your main stats, and perk points, which you use to unlock options in the skill trees. The world is heavily influenced by Japanese culture, because cyberpunk works do that. Specific areas of the city are run by gangs; these characters traffic in fetishistic racial markers and stereotypes—the Tyger Claws wield katanas and control both Japantown and Little China, while the Valentinos make murals to Santa Muerte and control the Latino areas of the city. As one email I found reads, “Night City’s a fucking dystopian cesspool...The 20th century’s worst fever-dream nightmares have come true before our very eyes.”. It made me wonder how everyone has the time, energy, and money to parktake of the world’s prodigious sex trade. Some story missions I’ve played have had very little combat, opting instead for hacking and sneaking that was ultimately on-rails but was still exciting. Many people in the world are afflicted with cyberpsychosis, a mental illness that affects some augmented people due to their implants, a tired trope we’ve seen in games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It can be traced historically through the game’s abundant lore, but the lived experience of it hasn’t felt real to me. It’s not a personal project focused on a topic or a message. People hate corporations, but also worship them and want to be part of them. (I reloaded; can’t fool me again, CDPR game!) It’s all just so cyberpunk, a modern game in love with decades of books, movies, and anime about the nihilistic techno-future. Its pre-release life has all been so much noise, the game’s marketing department and segments of its fanbase desperate to tell you how Good and Cool and Important it is. Much of it seemed offensive or trope-y, the surface appearance of diversity without much thought or sensitivity behind it. Read honest and unbiased ... 1.0 out of 5 stars I felt bad that I'm returning this after 10 mins. I found myself feeling the same way I do when people at work won’t stop Slack messaging me when I’m in the bathroom. There are trans people because everyone’s modifying their bodies in all kinds of ways. The game has yet to indicate if there are any other trans men in the world besides my version of V; I suspect I’m the only one, and I’m torn between relief and hoping to be proven wrong. The multi-tiered system of attribute and perk points felt like putting a safe in a locked room, with the additional requirement of street cred being a key hidden in a fake rock somewhere on the grounds. One important, interesting story scene included an incidental topless holographic dancer, her breasts undulating absurdly in and out of my field of view the entire time. Other than Yorinobu, Takemura considers the Arasaka family with the greatest respect and will even come to blows with those with anything bad to say. I learned to enjoy these systems, counterintuitively, by deciding not to try to figure them out. There’s been no game-changing Bloody Baron quest, at least yet—missions have been exciting and deliciously cyberpunk-y, but nothing that’s rocked me emotionally. Cyberpunk 2077 is an ambitious and deeply enjoyable RPG that evokes comforting comparisons to the good old days of Fallout and Deus Ex. Given that you’re playing as a blank slate, it falls short of being as rich and novelesque as The Witcher 3 if that is what you’re expecting. Sign up to get breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more, plus the hottest tech deals! It digs into some sensitive themes that are well above its pay grade, and the conclusions often ring hollow thanks to the game’s inherent edginess. While there’s more flexibility to this than we’ve seen in other games, tying binary pronouns to voice feels simplistic and retrograde. Looks like we have to get pretty much 100% completion. On the other hand, I could easily see the trans character’s appearance and voice being played for laughs. You’d be excused for being sick of it already, or just ready for everyone to stop talking and put it in your hands. In Cyberpunk 2077, you play as V, a mouthy merc who will do whatever it takes to become a living legend in Night City. The guns are similarly crunchy and punchy, just how we like them. It’s very easy to spend 30+ satisfying minutes quick saving and quick loading your way through one combat segment to get the right sequence of events you had mapped out in your head. I’m currently at level 25 street cred, another system that runs alongside this. NY 10036. In one side mission where I had to sneak something past a hostile gang, I used one quickhack ability to reboot a character’s optics and sneak by, then a different quickhack to hijack a vending machine, lure enemies to it one by one, and take them out silently. This can make the AI seem unintelligent, but it also lets me chip away at their health bars fairly safely, while giving me the breathing room to switch weapons, suck down health and stat-boosting items, and employ my quickhacks. A multitude of people, each with their own opinions, beliefs, and agendas. As Ian found in his preview, it can be hard to tell if I’m fully in cover, often getting me spotted. Approaching it this way not only slowly taught me the convoluted system, but made it fun. Wandering Night City’s business district, I found a tree that wasn’t a hologram like so many others in the game, encased in a glass plaza complete with piped-in birdsong, which I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t read a lore book that informed me that all birds in Night City have been killed. Main missions I’ve played so far have involved glitzy hacking heists in expensive locales, kidnappings requiring lots of explosions, and looking for information in a high-end, high-tech sex club. There was a problem. Even putting aside most of my other editorial and job duties, after 30 active hours of play and more spent in menus and glossaries, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Cyberpunk’s massive world. The good news: Cyberpunk 2077 is technically playable on a standard PlayStation 4 console. Basic XP flows pretty naturally, but I earned attribute and perk points slowly. The most powerful entities in Night City are mega-corporations that deal in technology, arms, and banking. I couldn’t sense it when I stuck to the story, but I started to find snippets of it when I let that story fade into the background. Kotaku got the game less than a week before embargo, and only on PC. In some scenes with hireable sex workers of different genders, I appeared to penetrate them—certainly possible, but with no indication that my character doesn’t have a biological dick. These ideas filter into the world through advertisements for water and cybernetic upgrades to do well at your new job, through anti-homeless spikes on all the benches and veterans begging for change, through conversations about the cyberpsychosis and PTSD so many people seem to suffer from, through sidequests about corrupt politicians and police forces closing ranks. Frankly, it’s hard to be enthused about the crystal ball punk manifesto of a game that brandishes influencers on its billboards... We’ve no idea how it plays on consoles just yet, but we played on PC with an RTX 2080 powering its stunning rain-slicked ray-traced streets. Mostly, this was just annoying; once, I missed a followup quest related to the woman in the bathtub that got lost in my quest log until I was at least 10 hours into the game. This game’s hacking mechanics put Watch Dogs to shame, letting you control almost every aspect of an environment in a fashion only rivaled by classic immersive simulators like Deus Ex. So far, as much as I wanted it to be, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t The Witcher but in the future. Few quests have moved me the way that game did. You’ll sear your synapses over a dubious dialogue choice in an otherwise unimportant side mission just because the framing is so interesting that you care about the outcome. From the jump, everyone talks in incomprehensible slang, the kind of thing I love to let wash over me when reading a William Gibson novel, but maddening as I struggled to parse conversations or find an item with a technobabble name that gave no clue as to what it was. It’s about a mercenary named V who, unlike the strong personality of The Witcher’s Geralt, is more of a canvas for the player to paint. Enemies take a lot of hits to put down, and in combat they tend to hang back or race from side to side with few interesting tactics. But after all the hype, and despite a certain disappointment of my own hopes, I’m also relieved to find that it’s just a video game. As with the game’s diversity, these big issues are hugely present in the game, but it isn’t really about them. Like The Witcher 3, it’s a game I want to play slowly, which is at odds with the nature of reviewing. In one side mission, I got a motorcycle through moving, personal circumstances, only to immediately ruin the moment by losing control of the overly-sensitive bike, smashing through several pedestrians, and getting the cops on my tail.). The sound designers and composers need a lot of credit for their thumping techno beats and Nine Inch Nail facsimiles that echo through grime-infested abandoned buildings and atmospheric bars. The Cyberpunk 2077 Trophy List seems mostly completion based. That feels incredible, but also hollow as a byproduct of the game’s obsession with its body mod future. However, melee combat, especially with blunt weapons, feels particularly floaty and disappointing, so it’s a shame that there’s an entire branch of missions based around it. Her companion replied, “Welcome to real life, sister.” As a trans person, this was a complicated, weird moment to overhear. Reeves’ performance is great fun to watch, but the writing that surrounds it undermines it. I spent a long time just standing around in this peaceful, easily-missed oasis. As I’ve earned myself better weapons, clothing, and equipment, what perks I don’t have feel like they matter less. There are so many corporations and characters and politics and backstory that are all, basically, excuses to get me to go to X cyberpunk place and do Y cyberpunk task. There’s almost always some way I can make do with what I’ve got. A few main missions went vastly different for me than my colleagues who are also playing based on our character builds, whom we chose to ally with, and what we chose to do. Whatever background you choose, a big heist goes wrong, and V finds himself in possession of a hot piece of technology: a biochip that promises a form of immortality. But I still have a lot of game left to play. But this is no cause for concern — because when it comes to RPG quest design, CD Projekt Red is the best in the business. It's a shame that this loyalty can bring about Takemura's end in-game if the player isn't careful. Verdict so far: While Cyberpunk draws on diversity, it doesn’t really do anything with that, in ways that are disappointing if you hoped for more, or anger-inducing if you’re sick of watching people who don’t share your identity use it as a trope or gimmick. There are in-game books and TV shows that flesh out the world. Check out all Trophies and Achievements for Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X. I haven’t yet found the heart of the game, that core that would make me want to curl up and live in it like I do The Witcher 3. It's a lot more dynamic in practice, but Cyberpunk 2077’s nearest neighbor combat wise is Fallout 4. The game lets me be a sober trans guy. I look forward to other writers exploring these portrayals in depth. We’ve had memorable moments scuppered by unruly animations and missing dialogue and textures. The fun factor, replayability, and value for money on offer is undeniable, and the limited market of FPS RPGs with immersive sim gameplay systems makes Cyberpunk 2077 an easy sell for those who love games like Fallout and Deus Ex — it’s an amalgamation of many of the genre’s best features. There was a sidequest that was personal and moving, at the end of which I thought I was making the right choice but actually made the complete wrong one. Cyberpunk’s racial, gender, and sexual diversity have been complicated topics in all the game’s pre-release leadup. (By the time you play, you’ll also probably be able to avail yourself of the kinds of guides that were vital to me when parsing The Witcher 3’s mutagens, crafting, and skill trees.) The developers have promised unlimited freedom, unparalleled graphics, and cameos from celebrities like Grimes and Keanu Reeves. This, alongside the many East Asian influences the game draws on, means the world is actually admirably multi-lingual; subtitles translate into your chosen language in real time, which is cool, even if the text flickering between languages can sometimes be hard to read. I don’t know what CDPR’s intention with the character was; it doesn’t feel like a celebration of diversity given the studio’s track record, but for all I know it could be. From quests we can’t complete to overlays not going away, there's a lot going on. But so far, all the game’s representation, the kinds of things many of us rightly demand from video games, feels employed more for color in the game’s futuristic world, or because it’s been used in cyberpunk media before. You’ll then be able to spot-check suspicious NPCs with stat-based dialogue checks that hark back to the halcyon days of Fallout 3. It tries too hard, stuffing itself with a tangle of complicated roleplaying game systems; with so many cyberpunk tropes, plots, and slang; with neon and holograms and so many in-game ads, most of them for sex; with car chases and hacking and corporate espionage and double-crossing powerful people; with a world where the human body is made obsolete with money and technology, while also chewed up and spat out for the sake of capital. The game itself wants so badly for you to think it’s cool, that it’s the cutting edge of graphics and game design, that it talks about edgy topics like body modification, corporate power, and the internet. The option felt like it was there mostly to give me some cyberpunk things to do. As a white, queer trans man, I can only speak to some of the portrayals from my experience, and there’s plenty of the game I haven’t seen yet. In a design choice that stayed with me even more, you’re given the option to abstain from drinking in scenes with alcohol, complete with specific dialogue options, animations, and responses from other characters. Counter it … You level up through playing—running around on foot instead of driving, for example, gives you XP in athletics under the body category. It’s courted controversy prior to release for negative depictions of trans people, trucking in racial stereotypes, and the labor practices of its development. Silverhand looks just like Keanu Reeves, who voices him, and he talks in a way I can best describe as “Keanu Reeves is voice acting.” Keanu Reeves skulking into a scene to voice act can be distracting, but he can also be interesting and charming. The big sweeping cinematic blockbuster. In the video game, they appear, from what I’ve seen, to be Haitian. The conversation comes after a key story scene, in an area you have to pass through to continue the quest; you could easily walk by it, but it’s hard to miss. There’s a lot of fun to be had if you make the game’s many systems your priority, but you can also just let the various trees do their thing in the moment. They’re easily missable, but they also feel vital for understanding things that happen in the plot. It runs – just about. Sometimes they’ll be about parsing through Braindances for clues. Some perks, as well as some actions you can perform in the world, are locked behind the stat of your base attribute—you’ll need level 20 cool to spend your perk points on the ability to guarantee a critical hit when you attack an enemy while sneaking. There’s a wonderful sense of possibility as I zoom over the game’s bridges on my difficult-to-steer motorcycle, the radio pounding and the neon lights welcoming me. Its reward was an item that would’ve served me well, if only I hadn’t lost it in the rapid-fire arrival of available tasks. Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. One clothing vendor spoke in stilted tones about sakura blossoms; V has the option to confront her by saying Japanese people don’t really talk this way, and she relents, admitting she does it to con tourists. If you think about it, there aren’t many single-player FPS RPGs of this nature on the market, so returning to this style felt novel, especially with the next-gen nuance implemented by CD Projekt Red. It’s a big, sprawling project touched by dozens of writers. As seen in pre-release information, a lot of trans content is consigned to in-game ads, such as the soft drink ad featuring a female-appearing character with a giant cock bulging from her leotard. The Witcher 3 explored themes of what it means to be human and how we care for each other in the face of evil. There are half-baked mechanics, glitches, and narrative missteps to contend with that you may or may not struggle to ignore. “Oh, so this is what fucking sororal solidarity looks like now?” she snapped. If things went awry, we’d rely on our cybernetic augmentations to do the talking, like our dermal engravings that let you wield Smart weapons with homing bullets and the Mantis Blades, razor-sharp forearm protrusions that let us mop up any mushy-brained stragglers. I don’t enjoy being V the way I enjoyed being Geralt. Story-wise, Cyberpunk is also a lot, with multi-quest main stories and an astonishing number of activities: meaty side quests from characters; gigs you can do for various agents called fixers; cyberpsychos to deal with as you please; map events you can do for the police, like stopping crimes and assaults; collectibles to search for; and people who need help. If you, like me, loathe these things, you can really just not worry about them too much. As if these are the only two options. Despite the controversy that’s swirled around it and its own missteps, it hasn’t yet inspired me to immediately consign it to the trash heap of retrograde video game shit. The head of the Krakow office even went as far to say that he thinks microtransactions are a “bad idea”. Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed multiple times in the past year, and developers crunched to finish it despite the studio’s several promises they wouldn’t. The character creator gave me something no other creator has: instead of locking me into “male” or “female,” it let me choose a traditionally masculine body type and voice, then give my character a vagina, making my character undeniably a trans man, like me. Unlike The Witcher 3’s fleshed out, compelling sidequests, many of the minor activities that pop up on my map or into my journal are basic and forgettable, fights against human enemies that lack the visual interest or behavioral quirks of monsters in The Witcher 3. What I’ve seen of the game takes place on one giant map, divided into districts, all with different visual themes: City Center is full of corporate plazas and highrises, while Westbrook houses sex markets and pachinko parlors.

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