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Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077
very minor sub-quest spoilers ahead
I Like It!
I've been playing Cyberpunk a bit after hearing a lot about it from some close friends. I've always been a sucker for games that depict the future through a political lens, so it's probably not a surprise that I'm very much enjoying my time with the game.
The premise of having an artificial construct of another person jammed into your mind is a captivating one. Doubly so when it's Johnny Silverhand. Silverhand is a rockstar terrorist responsible for detonating a nuke at the heart of Arasaka industries' mega tower. Needless to say, he hates corporations with a burning passion. Having chosen my character's background to be from said corporation, there was naturally a lot of initial conflict between us.
Beyond the initial theme of "Becoming a legend", there's one of being your own person. Despite being an asshole to just about everyone he's ever met - even going so far as to MASSIVELY violate your autonomy and get piss drunk once given control for a simple conversation. (Though the tattoo he got while in control was admittedly pretty cute.) Silverhand took notice that my dialog choices were sounding a lot like him, he does everything he can to help you unfuck your current predicament. He's dead set on living his ideals, and one of them is that everyone should be their own person. Not a corpo drone hot off the assembly line. Things like this make him a really interesting and complex character. It's great.
There's a few quests that I really enjoyed that captures that theme very well. First is a short one named "Violence". A famous celebrity thinks she's being cheated on and contacts you to confirm her suspicions. If you snoop hard enough, you find out that her boyfriend was actually trying to make a personality copy of her, similar to Silverhand. He says that ever since she's gotten so many transhumanist body modifications (I mean, the woman's skin is entirely chrome!) she hasn't been the same. He wants the version her that he fell in love with. When you speak to her, you can understand where the boyfriend is coming from (while not condoning his solution). She snaps in and out of this state of cold, robotic speech that I'm sure would scare anyone.
Still A Bit Rough
The moment to moment experience is solid. I wouldn't call the gunplay spectacular, but it gets the job done. Melee combat is fun once you've upgraded your gear to do appreciable damage, and you'll notice that limbs are dismembered a lot easier than you'd think (Might be all the chrome). My build was a net-running pistoleer who ran relatively light on augmentations. Even with a considerable amount of side quests to do and almost all of the fixer gigs untouched, most enemies can go down in only a few well placed revolver shots. If there's any criticism here, it might be that I feel I scaled into an absurd power level a bit too quickly. It's not the worst problem to have.
Even after numerous updates, the game is still buggy. Not nearly to the extent of unplayability it was at launch, but I still experienced my fair share of crashes, NPC freak outs, floating assets & lag spikes. I'd say there's at least one of these that would occur in every play session. Not enough to ruin the entire experience, but they're usually glaring enough to break any amount of immersion you've sunk yourself into.