Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that wants to drown you in sex and violence to convince you it’s mature, yet when the time comes to actually touch on mature or complex subject matter, it pulls its punches. 

Every time it got my ears to prick up, I was quickly left disappointed by a sci-fi world that feels as though it first needed to be approved by a flock of “Saka scum.” The game sprinkles mention of real-world socio-political issues throughout its open world and storyline as a kind of set dressing to be danced around. 

So while Cyberpunk  does have a few standout moments, overall, it ended up feeling more like Grand Theft Auto in the future than Deus Ex in an open world.

The RPG elements disappointed me the most. 

The dialogue choices are uninteresting, the player has little agency in how the story plays out apart from the endings, and build diversity is limited.

Let’s start with the dialogue. V doesn’t really feel like a character you can truly shape like in other RPGs because you’re consistently railroaded into acting in certain ways. 

Picking different options will only result in about one line of different dialogue if there even is more than one option. 

I never felt like I was V because they never said exactly what I would have said the way I would’ve said it. 

The game highlights dialogue that actually pushes the story forward in yellow, and there’s rarely ever any good reason to actually choose the other dialogue. This is really the most egregious sin here because it means rather than fully engaging with the system, you’ll just click through without really thinking. Especially since a lot of the time, there’s only one highlighted option.

 It’s the equivalent of a map marker for the dialogue trees, and it does tremendous damage to an already weakened system.

Without a doubt, this game has one of the best open worlds I’ve ever had the pleasure to explore. Night City is a gorgeous environment to explore.

The structure of the open world is a little less revolutionary. 

Side quests are just dumped onto the player whenever they enter a new area. While a lot of those side quests are pretty good, the way they’re received makes them inherently less interesting.

Despite any of Cyberpunk’s successes and failures, one specter lingers above all discussion of this game, and that is the technical state. 

This game is a complete technical disaster. It is packed to the brim with bugs and completely unoptimized. 

Trying to get this game to run is a Sisyphean task which always ends in massive frame rate dips. If you want to play this game on a last-gen console, good luck because you will be met with one of the ugliest games of the generation, which still routinely struggles to hold 30 fps. 

To call this game a beta would be extremely generous. The levels of polish missing here are absolutely stunning, and CDproject Red should be ashamed of themselves for thinking it was acceptable to bring this product to market.

This is one of the most disappointing games I’ve played in a long time. There have certainly been worse games in recent memory, but it’s been a while since a game promised so much and delivered so little.

If you’re a fan of games like GTA and Skyrim, you’ll probably enjoy this one, but if you’re looking for a more in-depth RPG experience, you’ll probably be left disappointed.