The most anticipated (read: hyped) PC game for several years now—Cyberpunk 2077—from CD Projekt Red, is almost here, and several gaming publications posted reviews of the game, as well as the way it handles on the PC. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world action-adventure RPG set in the near-future, with a non-linear adventure plot-line joined by dozens upon dozens of main- and side missions—not unlike GTA or RDR. What sets Cyberpunk's premise apart has to be its beautiful world that seems sufficiently futuristic to seem "plausible," and doesn't get carried away by futuristic tropes set by sci-fi franchises like "Star Trek." There's also plenty of social commentary from the creators through the game, which points to where we are likely headed.

As of this writing, review aggregator Metacritic rates Cyberpunk 2077 at 91, based on 44 critic reviews; while OpenCritic bases its bases its Top Critic Average at 91. The single player campaign consists of a main quest with innumerable optional quests. Night City and thereabouts, the fictional post-apocalyptic megapolis the game is based on, is a sprawling techno-concrete jungle with plenty to explore and unravel. Your skill-tree and abilities are based on cybernetic body implants and weapon mods. Critics highly praise the gameplay, the main quest, and the production value of the game—what you're paying for. At the same time, technical reviews point to the game still being extremely heavy on even the latest "Ampere" and "Big Navi" graphics cards, and despite CDPR taking its own sweet time releasing the game; it's still riddled with bugs and glitches that the studio will spend weeks—if not months—fixing.Gameplay Reviews
Cyberpunk 2077 is easily the year's most engaging game if you go by top critics; although it seems to fall short of being a "magnum opus."

Tom Marks from IGN writes "Cyberpunk 2077 kicks you into its beautiful and dazzlingly dense cityscape with few restrictions. It offers a staggering amount of choice in how to build your character, approach quests, and confront enemies, and your decisions can have a tangible and natural-feeling impact on both the world around you and the stories of the people who inhabit it. Those stories can be emotional, funny, dark, exciting, and sometimes all of those things at once. The main quest may be shorter than expected when taken on its own and it's not always clear what you need to do to make meaningful changes to its finale, but the multitude of side quests available almost from the start can have a surprisingly powerful effect on the options you have when you get there. It's a shame that frustratingly frequent bugs can occasionally kill an otherwise well-set mood, but Cyberpunk 2077's impressively flexible design makes it a truly remarkable RPG."

Right off the bat we see ominous signs that the game is riddled with bugs at launch.

Richard Scott-Jones from PCGamesN writes: "Groundbreaking, but not quite as much as you're hoping it is. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't surpass its brilliant influences, but in Night City, Johnny Silverhand, and its chilling vision of hyper-capitalism, it claims territory of its own."

Cyberpunk 2077 evokes a 1980s retro-futurist core-aesthetic. Think about the Detroit city depicted in the original RoboCop. Throughout the '80s futurists imagined crime-infested cities run by mega-corporations where democracy is an illusion at best and a delusion at worst, and corporations settle their differences through street gangs as their proxies.

Despite its technical flaws, Cyberpunk 2077 lives up to its expectations of being a remarkable RPG which you'll be playing for long after you've finished the main quest, says Spanish reviewer Víctor Rodríguez of Areajugones "Cyberpunk 2077 gives the player the ultimate freedom to play. A video game that takes the best of modern RPG, first-person shooter, stealth and open world games and masterfully blends it into a single product. If Skyrim and GTA V represented a turning point for their genres at the beginning of the 2010s, Cyberpunk 2077 is called upon to do the same in 2020, despite its technical flaws."

Daniel Van Boom of CNET writes: "Plenty of gamers will find Cyberpunk too much. It has a slow start -- you'll play for about four hours before even seeing the "Cyberpunk 2077" title screen -- and sometimes the main story moves at too slow a pace. Additionally, the roleplaying elements allow for varied combat, but some may find them needlessly complex, or simply overwhelming. A lot of people don't want to spend 50 hours playing one game, much less 200 hours to 100% it, and would rather a more linear, streamlined experience. Even with its shorter main quest, Cyberpunk is unlikely to sustain this type of player from start to end." Van Boom remarks that that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't meant for people looking to run through its quest, but rather people looking for the ultimate escape. "Anyone who's followed the game knows what they're in for. Players keen for a world to get lost in, a game to sink untold hours into, will be satiated by Cyberpunk 2077," he adds.

"Separated from its marketing, hype, and expectations, so far Cyberpunk 2077 just feels like a huge, scope-ambitious video game, with tons of attention paid to its lore and scenery and lots of dramatic things to do. It's not the best game I've ever played, as so many fans seem to hope it will be." writes Riley MacLeod from Kotaku. "Despite the controversy that's swirled around it and its own missteps, it hasn't yet inspired me to immediately consign it to the trash heap of retrograde video game shit. In many ways, it feels like it's about itself—its genre and source materials, the work that went into it, the flexibility it wants to give the player—from its character creator to its in-the-moment play. Saying "it's just a video game" doesn't quite explain what I find compelling about it, nor what I find complicated. But after all the hype, and despite a certain disappointment of my own hopes, I'm also relieved to find that it's just a video game," he adds.

Cyberpunk 2077 more than manages to be a game where you blink and hours go by IRL, notes James Billcliffe from VG247. "In the midst of such intense anticipation and scrutiny, it's easy to get carried away with what Cyberpunk 2077 could have been. The final experience might be more familiar than many predicted, with plenty of elements that aren't perfect, but it's dripping with detail and engaging stories. With so much to see and do, Cyberpunk 2077 is the kind of RPG where you blink and hours go by, which is just what we need to finish off 2020."

So, should you play Cyberpunk 2077 on the merits of its artistic content and gameplay? Considering that it's being sold at the same price as your annual Call of Duty fix; absolutely! But can you? To answer this question, Tom's Hardware did a technical review of the game, focused purely on how it plays on various current-generation graphics cards, and how certain settings such as real-time raytracing and DLSS affect performance.

Technical Aspects and Performance
According to Jarred Walton from Tom's Hardware, who tested a wide selection of graphics cards, resolutions, and combinations of game-settings; a GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 5600 XT should set you up for comfortable 60 FPS gameplay at Full HD (1080p) with Medium settings. 4K UHD with Medium settings takes at least an RTX 3080, even the RX 6800 XT is bogged down, and averages 55 FPS—and we're not even running the highest settings or raytracing!4K UHD with Ultra settings is devastating on most graphics cards, with the game being barely playable at 33 FPS with an RX 6800 XT, barely above 40 FPS with the RTX 3080, and no more than 46 FPS with an RTX 3090. The various DLSS presets come to the rescue of NVIDIA GPUs, adding 40-60 percent performance; however, AMD users won't have any such luck, with FidelityFX Super Sampling still being a unicorn.Another interesting observation by Walton has to be their CPU testing. An RTX 3090 paired with a 3-year old i7-7700K barely loses 1-2% performance compared to a Core i9-9900K, which has double the muscle. Both chips have an identical IPC as their individual cores are derived from the same "Skylake" microarchitecture; however you're barely gaining 1-2% going from 4-core/8-thread to 8-core/16-thread. This should mean that with Cyberpunk 2077, IPC is king, and if you're building a PC specifically for this game, you should allocate more of your budget on the graphics card, than the CPU.

Update 08:25 UTC: As one of our readers correctly pointed out, the performance preview was tested on graphics cards without day-one performance-optimization drivers; and you should wait for technical reviews with these launch drivers. The preview version also uses Denuvo DRM, which probably impacts performance, the release version won't come with Denuvo.

All in all, Cyberpunk 2077 seems like a game that you should definitely check out, considering it costs the same as your yearly Call of Duty fix.