Cyberpunk 2077 — Review

Score: 9/10

Few games have had a redemption arc quite like this one. Cyberpunk 2077 launched in a state that damaged CD Projekt Red's reputation, triggered mass refunds, and got the game pulled from a console storefront entirely — an outcome so severe it became the industry's go-to cautionary tale about shipping before you're ready.

Years, patches, and a full overhaul later, it's a very different proposition. What's remarkable isn't just that the game got fixed; it's that underneath all that launch chaos was always something genuinely exceptional, and it took the studio staying with it long past the point most publishers would have moved on to prove it.

About That Launch

It has to be addressed properly, because it's part of the game's story now. The 2020 release was a mess — game-breaking bugs, systems that plainly hadn't been finished, AI that behaved like placeholder code, and performance on last-generation consoles so poor it was effectively unplayable. The marketing had promised something the shipped product couldn't deliver, and the gap between the two was wide enough to be genuinely indefensible.

What followed was years of unglamorous repair work: performance patches, a comprehensive 2.0 overhaul that rebuilt the perk trees, police response, and vehicle combat from the ground up, and an expansion that stands among the best content the studio has ever produced. It's a rare case of a developer earning back trust rather than quietly abandoning a troubled release.

The version available now deserves to be judged on its own merits. That version is very good indeed.

Night City Is the Achievement

Night City remains one of the most convincingly realized settings in the medium. It's dense in a way few open worlds attempt — vertical, cramped, layered with signage and neon and infrastructure that suggests a city built on top of itself repeatedly. Wandering it on foot, you get the specific sense that this place existed before you arrived and would carry on without you.

Crucially, the city has a point of view. Every district communicates something about the world's economics and power structures — the corporate sterility of the centre, the improvised violence of the badlands, the fading grandeur of neighborhoods the money left behind. It's world-building through architecture, and it does more to sell the setting's themes than most of the dialogue does.

Writing That Punches Above the Genre

The side content is where the game does its finest work. Cyberpunk 2077's best quests aren't heists or shootouts — they're small, character-driven stories about people trying to hold onto something in a city designed to take it from them. A quest about a washed-up boxer, or a grieving family, or someone confronting what they've replaced of themselves with chrome, will frequently land harder than anything on the critical path.

The Johnny Silverhand relationship anchors the main story effectively, and Keanu Reeves' performance improved considerably once players had context for who Johnny actually is rather than the marketing version of him. V's own arc — a mercenary running out of time, forced to decide what matters when the clock is genuinely finite — gives the campaign a personal urgency the genre often lacks.

The multiple endings deserve mention too. None of them are clean, and several are quietly devastating. The game refuses to give you a version of victory that costs nothing, which is thematically exactly right.

Combat and Builds, Rebuilt

Post-overhaul, the RPG systems finally do what they always promised. Netrunning is genuinely viable as a primary approach, letting you dismantle an entire compound without ever entering it. Stealth builds work. Melee builds work. Full-frontal gunplay works. The perk trees now push you toward committing to a playstyle rather than sampling everything, and the game is more interesting for it.

Gunplay itself is punchy and responsive, cyberware modifications meaningfully change how you move and fight, and the addition of a proper vehicle combat system fixed one of the more glaring omissions from the original release. Police behaviour, once a punchline, now functions as an actual escalating threat.

Phantom Liberty Raises the Bar

The expansion is worth calling out separately. A tighter, more focused spy thriller layered into the main game, it features some of the strongest writing, mission design, and performances in the entire package — and its own set of endings that recontextualize what the base game is about. It's the clearest demonstration that the studio learned from its mistakes rather than just patching around them.

What Still Isn't Perfect

Some of the original ambition never fully arrived. NPC behaviour, while improved, still lacks the depth of the best open-world simulations. Certain life path choices matter less than the marketing implied. Occasional bugs persist, and the world remains more beautiful backdrop than fully reactive system in places.

The Verdict

Cyberpunk 2077 is the rare game that's become something genuinely great after starting somewhere genuinely poor. Night City is a landmark achievement in world design, the writing across its side content is among the best in the open-world genre, and the rebuilt RPG systems finally support the freedom the game always wanted to offer.

It should never have shipped when it did, and that history is worth remembering. But judged as it exists now — patched, overhauled, and expanded — this is one of the most distinctive and rewarding open-world RPGs available, and a genuinely impressive act of recovery.