Cyberpunk 2077 shows promise beneath bugs and controversial design choices

CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 arrives in a state that makes traditional reviewing nearly impossible. The game is so vast that a few days of play cannot fairly encompass it, so riddled with technical problems that evaluating it now feels premature, and so anticipated that millions will buy it regardless of what critics say. Yet here we are, trying anyway.

The studio's previous work, The Witcher 3, stands among the most celebrated games of the past decade—a title that redefined what open-world design could accomplish through superior writing, memorable characters, and player choices that carried weight. When Cyberpunk 2077 was announced during that game's peak, expectations became almost impossible to meet. The years of development that followed only amplified the hype, even as the studio faced mounting controversies: condemnations of crunch culture that seemed to contradict the company's own stated values, design choices around gang representation and gender identity that drew legitimate criticism, and repeated delays that suggested the final product might not be the masterpiece people imagined.

On PC, where this review was conducted, the game clearly needed more time. From the opening hours, bugs appeared regularly—characters failing to animate properly, objects suspended in mid-air, physics behaving in the absurd ways that plague most open-world games with simulated environments. A day-one patch may address some issues, but a project this scale cannot be fully polished before release. The campaign runs roughly 40 hours, though side quests will extend that considerably, and only a portion of that content was experienced here.

What CD Projekt Red has built, adapted from the tabletop RPG that inspired it, is undeniably rich. The world is exactly what cyberpunk should look like: overcrowded streets filled with augmented people moving between food carts selling lab-grown meat, beneath floating neon signs advertising cybernetic limbs and hacking software, all under the watchful eye of massive corporations with questionable motives. It draws directly from Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell, and Neuromancer—a crystallization of genre touchstones that feels lived-in and familiar. Yet that familiarity reveals a limitation. The gangs organized around racial identity feel anachronistic and poorly imagined for a future where such distinctions should matter less, particularly in a sprawling melting pot like Night City. A companion character's stereotypical Mexican tough-guy dialogue grates. Japanese staff at a corporate hotel perform stilted mannerisms. The world reads as extrapolated exclusively from the forward-thinking but still limited perspectives of smart white men from the 1990s.

Gender representation presents a similar contradiction. Players enjoy genuine freedom in selecting their character's presentation—an important step toward better queer representation in games. Yet elsewhere the game handles sex and gender regressively or inconsistently, implying that in a world where body modification costs pocket change, race and gender are fluid and therefore irrelevant. There is clear good intention in populating the world with people of different shapes, sizes, colors, and inclinations, but the execution stumbles regularly.

The game itself, beneath these issues, is genuinely good but difficult to categorize. Character development offers paralyzing freedom—brute force, stealth, hacking, and gunplay are all viable, but relying on only one will fail. A pure hacking approach becomes tedious; pure gunplay misses the point. In any given situation, whether infiltrating an enemy base or disrupting a street gang operation, multiple options exist but none is reliable enough early on to succeed without switching approaches. You are a Swiss Army knife, not a scalpel.

The open world is rich, perhaps overwhelmingly so. The map floods with icons indicating gun shops, criminal opportunities, and locations worth exploring—less a Ubisoft-style checklist and more a representation of a dense city where resources are everywhere. Driving, however, feels like Grand Theft Auto 3 in the worst way. Keyboard controls are inadequate, and the car becomes an uncontrollable instrument of chaos, mowing down pedestrians and causing accidents while you attempt to follow traffic laws. The GPS once routed through a pedestrian area with a gate too narrow for the vehicle, trapping it until it mysteriously freed itself offscreen. Another time, summoning the car resulted in distant explosions and screams; it arrived 30 seconds later completely destroyed, missing doors on one side, yet somehow repaired itself when not observed.

When actually playing cyberpunk—hacking, shooting, scheming, upgrading with better armblades and eyeball replacements—things feel smoother, if not entirely modern. The gunplay doesn't match contemporary shooters, melee combat sits at Skyrim levels, hacking resembles Deus Ex, and stealth falls short of Metal Gear. Yet no single game offers the breadth and richness of systems and environments that Cyberpunk 2077 delivers. It is simultaneously GTA: Night City 2077 and something entirely unique, futuristic and regressive, wide-open and restrictively narrow. Like many AAA releases, it contains multitudes. The simplest assessment: this game will be worth playing when it's finished. The Witcher 3 launched to acclaim mixed with criticism of its systems, then evolved into the genre-leading title it is today. Cyberpunk 2077 has that potential, but it has real problems that deserve addressing first. If patience is possible, waiting a few months will prevent the best of the game from being spoiled by the worst. At some point, this may become a pivotal title in gaming history. Just not yet.