Gameplay

Cyberpunk is without doubt the most hyped title of the last few years, and it's already a huge commercial success just days after release. The amount of drama surrounding the game is legendary. Especially when the first reviews came out, people on the forums went crazy, with heated discussions that seemingly never ended.

After playing Cyberpunk 2077 for several hours, I can definitely say that it's not the best game ever, not even the best RPG ever. It's definitely an excellent game, certainly one of the best this year, but Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin's Creed Valhalla are strong competitors that just came out, too, offering a similar style of gameplay, though in a completely different setting.

CDPR did an amazing job creating the world of Cyberpunk—it's extremely believable. They also sprinkled the world with elements that reinforce that impression, be it stickers and writing on walls or miserable NPCs who so obviously spell out "victim of capitalism." The quests and gameplay do take you to the darkest places of Night City, portrayed in a way that's still acceptable for an "M" rating, probably right at the limit of what's passable. Guess that means there are even darker places of Night City that aren't suitable for a video game.

While I haven't finished the whole game yet, the story so far has been completely linear. Most of the time you are able to work on side quests that are purely optional, but fun. There are also a lot of places to see and hang out at, though I have to admit I had more fun just wandering around in Skyrim and GTA V. The main story is captivating and interesting. At the start, I felt like there's too much happening, and too many characters get introduced, but this improves over time, once you get emotionally attached to these people. In later acts, the story drags on a bit, guess you can't please everyone.

For every mission, there are usually multiple ways to approach it; basically, tech/smarts, stealth, or shoot everything. The gunplay is solid, but less organic than what the setting would suggest. Just like in Borderlands, you may find weapons of different types, with special properties. For example, "power weapons" are classic firearms like we have today, while "smart weapons" have ammunition that automatically locks on a target and guides the bullet to it—even when you are not aiming at it. There are also plenty of melee weapons—katanas, knives, or hammers, for example.

The amount of loot is high, definitely inspired by Borderlands, too. I almost think it's too much, having a carry weight limit doesn't help here, either. In the world, you'll be tempted to pick up a lot of littered junk, even just to check out and decide whether you want it or not. To me, this part felt a bit like a time sink, as nearly all items are junk and not worth it. CDPR also included a crafting system which is alright, but doesn't offer anything we haven't seen before. Actually, that's one of the biggest achievements of Cyberpunk—it unifies fantastic ideas from lots of major games and franchises and beautifully integrates them into one big experience.

Besides guns, your character has various hacking skills, which can hurt or distract enemies—perfect for the stealthy approach, I feel like I ended up using those less often than I would have liked. Enemy AI is also extremely basic as they follow predefined patterns and are basically just bullet sponges.

The skill tree is quite complex, letting you spend points you acquire by leveling up. Most of the skills improve one stat or ability; they don't fundamentally change the playstyle. There are also numeric attributes which open up options on how you approach the game. For example, a higher Body rating will let you break doors for shortcuts, more tech lets you hack your way through, and the Cool stat adds new dialogue options to talk your way out of sticky situations.

A lot has been talked about bugs, so I made a tally sheet and have so far found 16—most are just cosmetic or minor glitches you may notice, but that won't affect you in any way. I had to reload an earlier save game only once, which is no problem because of frequent autosaves and the ability to save at any time out of combat, not just at predefined checkpoints. The game didn't crash once, not even when running several hours without a restart.

Overall, Cyberpunk is a definite buy from me, especially if you skipped Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed or already completed them. If you are playing either of those titles right now, maybe finish them first, which will give CDPR more time to fix all those little bugs and issues, so you'll have a more polished experience a month or two from now. Big kudos for making the title DRM-free; there's no Denuvo, or other annoying protections.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

From a technical perspective, Cyberpunk is just as impressive as long as you have the hardware for it. CD Project RED revamped their RedEngine, which powered The Witcher 3 back in the day. It's now running on DirectX 12 with support for Global Illumination and raytracing. No support for variable rate shading, mesh shaders, or sample feedback by the way, so it's not a full "DirectX 12 Ultimate" title. The Global Illumination system works great without raytracing and is capable of handing the full day/night cycle while keeping everything lit (mostly) properly.

I collected over 100 screenshots for this article, and I have to admit some are breathtakingly beautiful. In some scenes, the attention to detail is mind-blowing, and everything has been composed nearly perfectly. What annoys me big time is that the ground and wall geometry is so flat. Check for it in the screenshots, you'll never be able to unsee it. This is extremely apparent on roads and other large open areas—no idea why they didn't add more detail here. Objects inside the world are highly detailed, on the other hand, and paired with top-notch textures, nothing to complain about. The characters are certainly the cherry on top, as they are among the best ever seen in a video game.

I included a couple of screenshots where Cyberpunk looks like a ten-year old game. I suspect we're seeing the work of different teams here, possibly with different priorities and workloads. While I realize that creating such a game is a monumental task, it still spoils the overall impression of the game because it looks cheap and tarnishes the rest of the meticulously crafted game world. At least we're part of the PCMasterRace; for console gamers, the whole game looks like that.

The artists did fantastic work and achieved great things when it comes to lighting. While playing the game, I often thought "wow, how does this look with RT off?" and vice versa. In several cases, I found the non-RT lighting better even though I realized it wasn't as physically accurate as the raytraced version. During normal gaming, you'd never realize that; you'd have to look for it. Digging deeper into the RT effects, I'm also slightly surprised that many corners have been cut to help with performance. Theoretically, the promise of raytracing is "physically accurate," but in Cyberpunk, I can't even see myself in RT reflections? Only light from the sun and moon is used for raytraced shadows, and reflections are limited in how often they can bounce. Now, this kind of a compromise of course makes sense to achieve better performance, but it's still an important argument to understand the technology.

This article includes several comparison images for RT on and off. Especially the first one is a really convincing argument for raytracing. We see a tiled wall that has several neon signs of different colors next to it. While the rasterized version certainly looks fine—the lighting artists made sure of that—the raytraced version is just so next-gen—unimaginable a few years ago. Sure, we've seen tech demos that were created around such effects, but this is just a random spot in a huge game nobody specifically optimized for raytracing—it just works.

Given the massive raytracing performance hit of around 50%, we definitely need to focus on getting raytracing performance to usable levels first before dialing up the RT details even further. NVIDIA's DLSS technology can help with that as it renders the game at lower resolution and then uses an advanced upscaling algorithm to get you a high-quality anti-aliased output that looks nearly identical to the default TAA anti-aliasing filter at native resolution. At this time, Cyberpunk 2077 supports raytracing only on NVIDIA's RTX platform. AMD Radeon users will have to wait a bit longer, support is coming in a future patch. By the way, we did test the final public release version of Cyberpunk with the latest 1.03 patch and the game-ready drivers from AMD and NVIDIA.

Gaming performance is very demanding. For 1080p 60 FPS at Ultra you need a RTX 2070 or RX 5700 XT—AMD's last-generation flagship. Older "1080p" cards, like the RX 580 and GTX 1070, barely achieve 40 FPS, which means it is time to dial down the settings or buy a faster card. 1440p at solid framerates is possible with the RX 6800; RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Ti are close enough, with 56 and 58 FPS respectively. Yup, suddenly, the "4K" cards are only good enough for 1440p. My data from the recent Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed AAA launches supports that conclusion, too. Not a single card can achieve 60 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K at Ultra settings—even the RTX 3090 manages just 42.3 FPS, and the RX 6900 XT only 36.4 FPS. For some reason, contrary to other games, the higher the resolution, the bigger the performance hit compared to our 23-game review average FPS score.

Taking a closer look at that data, we see that AMD RDNA 2 does much better than AMD's previous generations, and Vega runs better than RDNA1 and Polaris, too. On the NVIDIA side, the data suggest good optimization for Ampere and Turing, while Pascal takes an additional performance hit. VRAM requirements are "2020," I would say, with around 6 GB at lower resolutions, 7 GB at 4K, and 10 GB with 4K + raytracing. I have to admit I'm surprised to even see a number as high as 10 GB with RT on. On the other hand, this value is low enough—all high-end cards today have sufficient memory, even the RTX 3080 10 GB. The engine manages memory very well even under pressure. While many other games crash on our older 3 GB or 4 GB cards, Cyberpunk runs perfectly stable, but of course at low FPS and with stutter—still an indicator for well-programmed memory management.

Last but not least, I have to mention the fantastic music, which fits the game so perfectly. You'll often not even notice that the music is there, but it adds so much to the overall experience, just like that perfect score in a Hollywood movie. The voice acting is also top-notch, and CDPR even developed a new technology that adds proper facial movement for spoken dialogue automagically, for several languages.