Genre: Action
Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: CD Projekt

Like a motherboard with a blown capacitor, CD Project Red's latest creative endeavor does not seem to work properly: textures are frequently Dreamcast-caliber; player models are circa 2013; HDR works more like a gamma correction than a provider of contrast; and the player, items, and NPCs frequently clip and wobble through terrain and objects, along with other oft-occurring and bizarrely anomalous behaviors. The result is a game which looks short-circuited: blurry and broken. Even real-time ray tracing, ordinarily bewitching, looks maligned and malfunctioning in this futuristic world.

Professional grade voice acting is a base expectation in big budget video games these days, and Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't disappoint, at least as it pertains to the story's main characters. By contrast, random NPC and baddie chatter is reminiscent of what one would expect from an "Elder Scrolls" release. There is licensed rap and teenie-bopper "nu-metal" music available during car rides, ala "Grand Theft Auto", although it's all about as forgettable as the drab synth which occasionally wafts in, penetrating the aural void present during most of the gameplay.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a Bethesda "Fallout" game, with cars: the vast majority of the core loop involves relieving endless containers and fallen foes of their possessions: junk and firearms, mostly. Certain objects and enemies can be "hacked" via a hold of the left bumper button, although this and the primitive stealth system take a back seat to encounters which generally devolve into basic first-person shooter gunplay. Meanwhile, the haphazard placement of containers and static meshes in the environments makes it difficult to establish much of a rhythm during encounters.

The whiff of fried electronics emanating from mediocre artwork, a broken graphics engine, and graceless player movement, is compounded by the game's writing dropping f-bombs every sentence, while maintaining a lower narrative standard and worldview than a juvenile 6th grade English class. CD Projekt Red can find redemption in the fact that they have, for better or for worse and like another contemporary release in "Shenmue III", ignored both the progress and annoying habits established by game development over the past twenty years-- and in that sense, the Cyberpunk 2077 experience would have felt more natural in 1998, showing off the power of people's "Voodoo 2 SLI" setups.