Cyberpunk 2077 is a masterclass in style over substance. Night City may look alive, but beneath the neon glow lies a game that’s painfully hollow. The gameplay loop is boring and repetitive—an endless churn of gigs that feel procedurally generated, not narratively crafted. It’s a basic looter-shooter dressed up as an RPG, with barebones mechanics that barely scratch the surface of role-playing depth. Characters come and go without leaving a mark. Dialogue is forgettable, relationships are shallow, and emotional stakes are nonexistent. You play it once, and that’s it—there’s no real replay value, no alternate paths worth exploring, no choices that truly matter. Compared to The Witcher 3, the contrast is brutal. That game was rich with consequence, character, and world-building. Cyberpunk feels modular and disposable, like a sandbox built for screenshots rather than storytelling. Its redemption arc? Not the game itself, but Cyberpunk: Edgerunners—the anime that succeeded where the game failed. It delivered compelling characters, emotional weight, and a coherent vision of Night City that the game never managed to achieve. Without it, Cyberpunk 2077 would’ve been remembered solely as a cautionary tale of overhype and underdelivery. Even with the 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty, the core flaws remain. More polish, same emptiness.
I'd like to give it a positve note, but I just can't do it due to the crazy amount of bugs that cause quests to be stucked. For example one of the NPCs will take a quest item (a soul jar) from you, which doesn't belong to her, and therefore will lock you out of possibility to win a battle with otherwise immortal enemies. I read that there is a specific strategy to make sure that this bug doesn't occur, but honestly I'm just tired and won't be starting over again my 10h run. Yea, you have a tons of options to play this game but you really can't as the game will get stucked due to the quest bugs if you won't do it in a specific way. Battle system is fine, though its aspects are not introduced very well to the player. Character progression system is obscured - you pretty much have to google what skills are available for each attribute. Otherwise you will find yourself respeccing you character over and over. And there is also very hidden gimmick with some stats increasing damage additively and some dioing that multiplicatively - the difference in damage output is huge - but both presented in tooltip to be % increase which which is very misleasding. Story is a bit better than D:OS1, and characters are way better. Though, these are not even close to BG3 or Pathfinder: Kingmaker or WOTR. Music though, is on par with BG3 - easily the best thing this game has to offer.
I've played the game on release and then the second time right now with 2.1 patch update. I can't understand CDPR marketing claims that this is a fixed game now. Only within 2 hours of game time I had several hard crashes (mostly when tinkering with DLSS settings - I have 4090 and wanted to try out new ray tracing and DLSS options). I've fallen under the map - during fights while dashing, in elevators when reading text messages, or when driving cars. NPCs still tend to sit in the air or move through walls. Inventory item tooltips are still getting bugged, and only show currently equipped weapon instead of the item you selected. Bugs aside, game main issues are still there, that being: - no exploration - as there is nothing to explore. Night City is just a board to put buildings (which all look and feel the same) for gigs to happen in (which also are basically the same thing over and over again). - character progression feels so irrelevant. You will be leveling so fast you won't be able to tell whether those levels impact anything at all. Putting points in stats and then wondering whether anything increased at all. And yea, enemy level scaling is just such a lazy way of making poorly designed encounters (by poorly, I mean no enemy variation at all) drag on. - no meaningful choices and consequences, - no likeable characters. The game characters feel like they were designed to be a one time appearance for a single episode of Law and Order rather than a RPG game. There is no relation between them and for the most part with V himself. For most of the in-game time the only interactions with them will pertain to some gig they will have you do, rather than the main story. And when you do actually push the story, their involvement will be limited to sending you a text message that they worry about you. Johnny while greatly designed character, feels really incohesive due to the scenes that develop his relation with V being randomly thrown out on the map. 6/10
