Cyberpunk 2077 for the casual gamer

I am definitely a casual gamer. I buy perhaps one or two games a year, fire them up, never finish them and move back on to working for a living. Owning an older Acer Nitro does make getting new games a little more attractive though. My favourite game of all time is the same one many people my age have: Deus Ex

Deus Ex was something of an obsession for a while. I loved the game play. If you're not familiar with it, it's a near future role playing game where the protagonist can upgrade themselves with various modifications to make them a better fighter, or better hacker (broadly anyway). As you acquire different skills, your gameplay changes and how you approach each level changes. The first run through I really did treat it like an RPG, not sure whether my actions would affect the story. Most that was a carefully crafted illusion. The storyline does branch somewhat but mostly it's on rails with the rails hidden fairly carefully. On subsequent playthroughs of course all that disappears and you realise that you can level up much earlier than you thought simply by being an incredibly thorough scavenger. The first playthrough I thought the ammo supplies were too limited, there weren't enough lockpicks or multitools to open doors but the levels were designed so that you can start pretty much with nothing and still get through it with stuff that is lying around. It encourages experimentation and even some truly strange emergent gameplay. I never card much about the sequels as they fiddled around too much with the game mechanics. The original is the best one.

Well OK but what about Cyberpunk 2077

As I said I'm a casual gamer. I mostly buy games through Good Old Games rather than Steam, and no longer read gaming magazines like I used to. The hype around Cyperbunk 2077 was pretty much unavoidable though and the combination of things the developers claimed they were doing sounded fantastic. Watching the storm of criticism over the initial release was somewhat disappointing.

However, it's on sale at the moment at GOG so I figured an early Christmas present was in order.

This one picture pretty much sums up my experience so far (I think I'm about a third the way through the main story)

Yeah, that's the kind of clobber I like to wear every day.

One of the gameplay mechanics is armor. In CP2077 the armor isn't armor really, it's bits of clothing that have been reinforced in special ways. The clothing interface tells you, after you have looted some poor, dead mook, whether their looted clothes are better than what you are wearing.

So that's how I ended up with the crazy helmet, the weird looking jacket and shoes and most special of all, the booty shorts.

The main character "V" is supposed to be commanding respect while dressed up like he listened to Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" and took it to heart. I can just picture that jacket smelling like R. Kelly's sheets. I have been laying waste to what seems like a hundred gang members, all dressed perfectly in character, while I get around like that. Lucky there aren't a lot of mirrors in Night City.

OK, so it's a bit stupid

Well, it is. Deus Ex was ridiculously serious, like an Ultravox song. The levels are small, the story is fairly short and there is no open world at all. It works though

Some of the systems in CP2077 are very reminiscent of Deus Ex: the body mods are similar, the weapons are similar and it even has distinct ammo classes (unlike the sequel to Deus Ex). The story isn't the crazy, conspiracy laden wonderland of Deus Ex but I'm not sure anybody wanted that again anyway.

The world of Night City seems endless (at least it does at the moment). There seems to be a never ending stream of messages coming in to "V" trying to get him to do various jobs not related to the main plot. I ignored these at the start but the main story got kind of hard, and it was only then I realised that all the levelling up you do comes from grinding through those side gigs, chasing down Police related jobs, digging through other peoples trash and trying to get value for money from upgrades and weapons. I really wish I had found a sniper rifle much earlier in the game - my first real victories came from getting stabby as I accidentally found a knife that just happened to do the most damage of any weapon I had found so far. The pink pistol you see in my inventory came from doing some job or other, for some inexplicable reason it does twice as much damage as anything else and half the time, my poor victims get set on fire for good measure.

I guess my major criticism so far of the game is that the complexity is overwhelming. It's not immediately obvious that the "fixers" calling you for jobs are the key to grinding efficiently, that you really need to do the side stories to understand the plot and that the little symbols flashing on your map from the Police are generally worthwile doing for cash. Keanu Reeves popping over your interface is incredibly annoying, and his character is a completely unlikeable jerk.

Having said that, I am now having a lot of fun shooting gonks in the face, picking them off with the sniper rifle I finally found, getting some value out of the hacking and taking my sweet time with the main story. When you are chasing gigs, it plays somewhat like the open world gangster games like Grand Theft Auto, of which I struggle to play as the driving is too frustrating and I end up getting lost and giving up. At least in CP2077 there is a neat path finding feature that seems to work quite well for navigation.

There are still a few bugs apparent in this version of the game, such as the "Gangoons" not triggering correctly in one of the side missions, or a sudden, massive pile-on of every gang member in the area on that particular mission. I went back to an earlier save and skipped it until I can amass some more firepower.

It's fun, you should play it

CP2077 is more fun than frustrating. If you're looking for tips or help, I'd recommend the "low sodium" cyberpunk reddit for the game, the main one seems to be filled with a pile of toxic man-children who think they are owed some kind of fantasy mega-game they invented in their minds rather than an engaging diversion.