CD Projekt RED no longer the small polish studio, which surprised the world with The Witcher saga. Now it is the second largest video game company in Europe; a team where I know they unite talent and resources to tear the veil and show us what the future will be like. And the future is called Cyberpunk 2077.
Rivers of ink have flowed in anticipation of what the game promised: life in Night City (a "hole" of steel and neon where life and death strike each day), the body modifications, the possibilities of V, the protagonist, to survive each day ... in our Cyberpunk 2077 review we don't want to overload your neural circuits with information. We want to make it clear that that tomorrow they promised us has come true.
Cyberpunk 2077 era one of the most anticipated games of the generation. After some delays and complicated development - which we have not come to discuss here - the time has come for us to explain why CD Projekt RED's work, based on the role-playing game by Mike Pondsmith, is one of the best titles we've ever tried. It's a game that will be as influential for the genre and gamers as Skyrim or Fallout 3 were 10 years ago.
So, everything they had told us was true? I was in the game's first gameplay, at E3 2018. I was one of those incredulous people who looked at the hands of the demo manager to see if he was really playing that mission. Two years later I have found myself playing that same mission, as part of the prologue.
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Before proceeding with the review of Cyberpunk 2077, two more warnings; It is a totally spoiler-free text, because it is worth it for each of you to have the same feelings of wonder, epic, disgust and excitement that we have had while playing.
The second is that, like the game, it is about an analysis for adults. Cyberpunk smells of blood, sex, tobacco, but also metaphysics and the crisis of humanity. Our text, too. To give you an idea, if we said that GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 were two perfect portraits of their time, the CD Projekt RED game is a perfect projection of where we can end up in the near future.
I have seen things you would not believe
Cyberpunk 2077 elegantly moves between RPG and sandbox. It has the skeleton of a classic RPG, from character creation to quest system and progress, but the action sequences are so well resolved which can be played almost like an open world game.
We begin with the character editor. The fact that it is such a complex creation engine makes all the sense in the world; V is not just someone we are going to accompany; it is the life we want to live while in Night City. That is why it seems reasonable that we choose their sex, their appearance, implants ... and also their genitals, tattoos or skin defects.
As befits an RPG, we can also distribute a number of points among the main features. Keep in mind that most of the actions in which we will be involved are resolved well by force, infiltration or as a netrunner, hacking devices. Depending on the level we reach in each of these "branches" we will be able to achieve better results.
There is a final decision that not only determines the past of our character, but also allows us to enjoy an alternative start. We must choose an origin among nomads, hustlers and the corpos. Each of the three factions can "hug" our merc, and it translates into an exclusive start-up mission and different options during conversations.
In this way, by conversing with any character we can demonstrate our knowledge about the city, life in the badlands or the ins and outs of large corporations, such as Arasaka or Miltech, who are the ones who pull the strings in this society of the future.
As one of the Cyberpunk 2077 characters says, 90% of a detective's job is to talk, so we don't have to get obsessed with creating a "killing machine." It is much better to savor the game being faithful to our character. As we improve our skills we will be able to bend the city.
Attack burning ships beyond Orion
Night City is much more than a big city. The Cyberpunk setting picks up the essential influences of the genre, such as Blade Runner, la Neo Tokio de Akira o Ghost in the Shell, and gives it personality. The megalopolis is divided into different zones, perfectly differentiated; the financial center with luxury stores and the great buildings of the corpos, the ghettos like Chinatown or Japan Town, the red light district or the badlands on the outskirts.
Don't let his name mislead you. This gigantic city is not always plunged in darkness. It is true that his soul is in the rainy nights, when the neon lights and holograms are reflected on the wet asphalt, but there are also areas, such as Pacifica, which are more open, where the sun filters through the ruins of the shopping centers. .
The game map is huge. But it's not just about its length. Night City is built vertically. Beneath the skyscrapers and highways are several levels bustling with life, where members of urban tribes mingle with corporate workers, police officers or the trauma team, which takes care of health. The "lore" of the game is enormous, and in every corner we can find positions and perfectly justified activities.
This city of the future wouldn't be so compelling if it weren't for brilliant artistic direction that reaches every corner. The design of the vehicles is tremendous, like the fashion and body modifications worn by the NPCs. That decadent technology that one would find in the slums has been adapted, and also the excessive luxuries in the privileged areas. The advertising that constantly assaults us sends sexual and aggressive messages; it is a nightmare of the consumer society.
After having invested countless hours in the game, we still give up using fast travel. On every corner there may be something interesting, a business, a contact that leads us to a fixer or a cyber psychopath, whom we can kill to get a better reputation and a reward in Eurodollars. While the urban area has an unprecedented density, the moors and landfills on the outskirts offer an interesting contrast. They are almost desert, except for the nomadic settlements and small road towns.
The board is ready. It is time to start the game. And in this case the pieces are dozens of characters that will cross V's path and that will leave us marked. And we mean it with total sincerity. The game gets it to be believed a bond of friendship -almost as if he were our brother- with Jackie Welles, that we fall in love with Panama, or Judy, or Rogue ... and that we have empathy, respect and hatred for many other secondary ones. It's about the way they speak, their body language, the way they surrender to their motivations and suffer trapped in the city.
Make a Guy Ritchie-style montage, going "fast forward" through everything the city has to offer: a tightrope race to stardom, going through fights, shootings, chases, drugs, body implants, sex, reflections on our own life ... and without forgetting the winks that are scattered here and there, such as turning Hideo Kojima (the creator of Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid) into a character, placing Glados de Portal in the Artificial Intelligence of a car or giving us T-shirts of the White Wolf, Geralt of Rivia.
C-rays glow in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate
The mission system is one of the great successes of Cyberpunk 2077. We finished the main plot in about 25 hours, without repeating the work schedule at any time, and without going to the courier orders. With the lesson well learned compared to other "sandboxes", the game tries to make every action justified. And many of them are interspersed, leaving in suspense what will happen to one character, while we carry out a sabotage or murder for another.
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Find out moreWe can say the same about the secondary schools (which last up to 40 hours). They are complex missions that are linked in a small story arc and that usually involve meeting with someone, preparing the coup, carrying it out, and some kind of epilogue. At a lower level we have tasks for the police, racing, shooting competitions or collecting vehicles, which are more conventional, and offer much more content. But the good thing is that at any time we can decide on one or the other depending on our needs.
TKeep in mind that the money in Night City is spent quickly, and it takes time to get. The progression of the character (with skill trees and with the possibility of modifying our equipment and placing ourselves implants) is slow, and it will take a long time to get the components and the dough to have a competent character, in this way, the game forces us to move slowly ... starting with a prologue that lasts more than 4 hours.
As we have anticipated, the driving, infiltration and first-person shooter mechanics are very well implemented. The same can be said of the exploration, thanks to an eye implant that is capable of detecting clues, or "hacks". But we do want to stop at neurodance research.
The neurodances are a tribute to the sequence in which Deckard explores some images in Blade Runner, but executed in 360º. We have to navigate through a 3D recording looking for clues, both visual, sound or thermal (changing the lenses that are used). Rewinding and returning to the most relevant parts of the recording, and the feeling of being authentic detectives is very good.
Finally, we stop for a second on the sex sequences. In a world where everyone can modify their body at will, it almost seems logical that erotic messages are everywhere. In advertising, in the way of dressing, in stores. Throughout Cyberpunk we can have relationships with a handful of characters, from "professionals" to others with plot importance.
Sexual encounters have surprised us by their variety and good execution (usually in a video game they are somewhat uncomfortable or ridiculous) and they are also quite varied; it is not limited to the same scene changing the protagonists. It is another step forward in this very delicate subject in video games.
All those moments will be lost in time
You will wonder how we got here without talk about Johnny Silverhand. The character played by Keanu Reeves he is a fundamental piece in the game, the true "show stealer". It captivates us by its appearance, a seamless interpretation and lines of dialogue that ring in our ears.
Having played Neo in The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic, Reeves has found the ultimate cyberpunk role. But it plays a much bigger role than guest staring. Here we leave you the actors who have accompanied Keanu Reeves in the game.
Johnny and V are the two sides of the same coin, and that creates situations that manage to put the player in a "real" moral dilemma. If V represents the brain, Johnny is instinct, vice and madness; it has an undeniable appeal that extends beyond the character.
Around Silverhand orbit the most interesting characters in the game. In a world of criminals, corporates and netrunners, he associates with the true stars of Night City. And not everything is sex, drugs and rock and roll ... it is also a door to metaphysics, and to contemplate some of the most serious aspects of Cyberpunk.
The character has such a great magnetism that some of the best rewards that we find in the game are his old Porsche 911 and Malorian 3516 pistol. We can't even imagine the amount of Samurai (Johnny's musical group) tattoos that we're going to see from now on. Here we leave you all the video games with Keanu Reeves.
Like tears in the rain
You can't talk about Cyberpunk without mentioning all the technical milestones it has pulverized. PC specifications what have we done this with Insights They are quite impressive, with an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 GPU, 32 GB of RAM and an SSD disk, which has allowed us to activate Ray Tracing lighting, HD textures and DLSS. Later we will offer you the analysis of the game on consoles, to see how far it goes on more limited hardware.
A part of this technical prodigy is simply brute force. The quality of the photorealistic models and textures, the lighting and ray traced reflections, the amount of detail down to the smallest object. But there is more. For a first-person game, the animations and physics are exceptionally well cared for. The way in which each character reloads the weapons, or in which we activate the different types of switches and springs is perfectly natural.
The beauty of Night City is in its imperfections. It is difficult to find two identical characters; in the way they dress, in their appearance and in the way they move. The way Panama follows us with her eyes and makes a little pout when we put her arm over her shoulder is the closest thing to real life. Motion capture is great.
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See offer on AmazonIn combat, the effects of destruction of weapons, with dust and particles flying through the air -almost a tribute to the sequence of the lobby in The Matrix-, or the way in which enemies burn if we have installed a "mod" of Incendiary ammunition is spectacular. As well as the dismemberment that occurs with critics. The physics is more difficult to adjust in close combat, and yet it is also well resolved.
I would not dare to say if it is the I play with a better technical execution that I have tried, but it is at the height of masterpieces like Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Last of Us Part II. Inevitably, in such a colossal work, we have also encountered the inevitable "bugs", but none of them have been too serious, nor have they broken the immersion in the cyberpunk world. The REDENGINE engine is a true "beast".
The weak point is in artificial intelligence. As tough as the enemies are, sometimes they are not able to react even if we shoot them from close range, and the traffic also behaves in a strange way, if we go through Night City at full speed, with empty areas of cars or "strange traffic jams" ".
As for the physics of the vehicles, as in other "sandboxes", it gives us the feeling that they are too heavy, and tend to skid, but it only requires a little practice, and this makes driving more exciting o " cinematographic ".
This is only what refers to the visual section, but it is convenient to stop to talk about the sound. The first thing we want highlighting is the dubbing into Spanish ... an impeccable dubbing of thousands of lines of dialogue. It is not only that the conversations are perfectly interpreted, but that they respect the cultural, sexual identity and the jargon of each one. It is a magnificent work that makes the Japanese, for example, turn to traditional sayings of their culture.
Each character speaks their own language, with words like merc, corpo or fixer, integrated into a language that mixes words from different languages, much like Blade Runner. And the location is so great that all the missions are named after Spanish songs like "Bad times for lyrical", "Between two lands" or "How we have changed", it is something very much in the style of Johnny Silverhand, of course.
The sound effects are up to the task, and it is especially noticeable when we leave the city and listen to "silence" compared to the engines, conversations and commercials that saturate us in Night City. In addition to great background music at certain times, when we ride in a vehicle we can tune in to different stations with licensed songs.
It's time to die
In the world of triple A games, Cyberpunk 2077 is in a new category; that of a quadruple or quintuple set A. From a production point of view, it is only comparable to Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Last of Us part II, but its development is more ambitious and varied.
If our team allows it (but we are not talking about a precisely economical PC) it is the most spectacular game on a technical level. We have already said that it also has some bugs, but keep in mind that we have played the version without patches, and yet it has left us speechless with its lighting, the variety of models or the animations. Later we will talk about the console game, and in a few months, about the versions optimized for the new generation.
But if this game is going to go down in history, it is because of the possibilities that Night City offers. The main story is memorable, and the characters are very well portrayed, with a special mention for Johnny Silverhand. And yet, what is going to consume us hundreds of hours is to go to the last corner, wandering like a true merc in search of opportunities to get a new weapon, a better vehicle or an implant.
With development as early as Cyberpunk 2077, it was very easy for something to go wrong. The pressure on CD Projekt RED's shoulders was enormous, and the delays did not bode well. In fact, all the information that has been anticipated in the Night City Wire made us fear that there would no longer be surprises when the game came into our hands. However, we love to deliver good news. As we suspected, it is one of the best games of the year, even of the generation. And I'm sure that in many months we will continue to talk about what its universe gives of itself, as has happened with other great RPGs.
Assessment
One of the best RPGs of the generation, both in terms of its technical sections and the setting, great character development and a variety of missions. The long wait for Cyberpunk 2077 has been worth it.
Hobby
98
Masterpiece
Best
Setting, technical section, variety of missions, characters ... it is one of the best games of the generation.
Worst
The soundtrack does not have a "memorable" theme song. We will have to check how it performs on current consoles.
(131)
