Cyberpunk 2077 Review PC

As I watched the credits on Cyberpunk 2077, my eyes couldn’t avoid being drawn to the bottom right corner. As the hundreds, maybe thousands, of names rolled over 39 minutes and 30 seconds, a single line of dialogue remained.

A line of dialogue from almost an hour ago.

It’s both the smallest and most perfect representation of the Cyberpunk 2077 experience. As was the case over a week ago, when I first captured the essence of CD Projekt Red’s love-letter to the original Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 is literally bursting with ambition.

It’s not just the case on the base PS4 and Xbox One, where the performance is so deficient that CD Projekt Red issued an apology less than a week after the game’s release. It’s also true on PC. I’ve invested over 60 hours into the game there across multiple characters, as well as a bit of time with the game’s prologue on Xbox Series X for a brief comparison. (Other colleagues on Kotaku Australia have spent time with the game’s PS4 version via the PS5’s backward compatibility mode.) At night, with the right hardware and the right mix of NPC density, rain and neon lighting, the effect can be truly astonishing.

Over the last week, Cyberpunk’s propensity for hard crashes has subsided. The quirks that remain are both minor and cripplingly major. I’ve had NPCs attempt to charge my position, only to quite literally fall in front of me as they fail to navigate a body. Loot will be littered across a level after a fight, but some of it will remain left behind, because the game refuses to let me pick it up. I’ve had the game some determine that I’ve committed a crime despite not touching a nearby civilian, causing police to immediately spawn behind me, like they’ve just emerged from a secret closet ala DOOM. Some have been more convenient, but immersion breaking, like mini bosses and higher level enemies frozen in position or stuck to the floor.

Others were more aggravating. What’s replaced them has been no less fun: I’ve had to restart hours of gameplay because of quests that couldn’t be resolved. They were earmaked as side quests, but it wasn’t apparent until later the finale that I needed to complete those quests to unlock some of the game’s alternate endings, endings much more befitting of V, Johnny Silverhand, and the time I’d spent with the game.

Some break the game’s visual appeal. One quest saw an NPC get up from a chair, triggering a malfunction of the biochip in V’s head that causes Johnny Silverhand’s consciousness to bleed over. But occasionally, a blur effect would be applied the entirety of the screen that wouldn’t fade once the relic began operating more normally, necessitating a restart. Other quirks are more minor and funnier: NPCs floating through the air chasing a vehicle they’re supposed to be sitting in, character’s penises protruding through their clothing, models T-posting while stuck inside objects, cars occasionally launching into the air, NPCs stuck in animation loops, floating guns, collision errors, straight up teleporting, and your character stripping mid-ride. Even the credits aren’t immune from crashes.

How much it interrupts the experience depends when and where. The game’s been more stable in my experience since the day-one patch and subsequent hotfixes. But at the time of writing, every major mission or side gig I’ve played has been hit with at least one bug that’s impacted the experience. It’s either been severe enough that it’s necessitated a restart. Gameplay has sometimes been affected via UI glitches, like objects that wouldn’t let me scan them, or characters that I couldn’t speak with to move the game forward. And combat would often run into AI and collision errors, like characters freezing in place mid-fight, failing to recognising V’s presence.