Challenge accepted.
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CYBERPUNK 2077 - THE POLYGON REVIEW
CD Projekt Red's eagerly anticipated first-person role-player is well made but falls problematically short in addressing the most important themes that are expected of such a title.
I'm driving around Night City in my shiny pointy-fronted car. I've got the radio tuned to a parade of 1980s style electro bangers, and I'm looking all around myself. The neighbourhood I'm in is called Watson, and it is poverty-stricken and depressed. It is also mostly inhabited by people of colour. Everything is gorgeously rendered with ray-tracing and volumetric lighting. But I hate myself. Why? Because in the game, I'm rich (I have more eddies than I could ever spend) and I'm swanning around flaunting my wealth in front of the poorest in society. In a rational, logical setting, they would be mobbing me and driving me out of town, even though I have a job to do here.
The optics of a white guy forcibly "repossessing" something owned by poor people of colour hasn't occurred to V, my protagonist. And it hasn't occurred to CDPR either.
Earlier on, I took a mission against a gang called the Animals. They were mostly black. The game's HUD showed the word, "Animal," above the heads of black people. I was literally encouraged to shoot them down in cold blood. Because they were animals. And CDPR had the effrontery to delay Night City Wire because black lives mattered.
Even in character creation, I thought there was some glimmer of their having learnt from their previous title, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. That game was rightly criticised for not having people of colour in it. Or any meaningful representation of racial, religious, or sexual minorities other than as a joke or a throwaway. I was encouraged by the ability to select my pronouns and my body type and genitals (yes, genitals) independently of each other. But then I realised, they don't want their audience to create a realistic trans* protagonist. They just want to treat being trans* as some sort of fetish. I didn't select to have other-gender genitals, because I felt that I needed to stay in my lane. But I suspect that if I did, I would be treated in game as some sort of joke. I have seen my colleague playing as a female character. She was subjected to gendered slurs within the first hour. The message was clear: this game is by, and for, straight cis dudes, and CDPR's recent solidarity with BLM and other progressive movements is performative allyship. I would have thought that in a world where people can literally change their face with cyberware, this game would actually portray a world in which being trans, non-binary, or genderqueer is not a sport or an aberration, but a valid identity. A world where some women have penises, and that's okay. Not a world where women with penises are treated as a way to advertise energy drinks. Have the developers learned nothing?
Gameplay is fast, furious, and fluid. Whether it's walking around Night City admiring the sights or shooting up bad guys, it feels solid and looks stylish. But on another level, it feels... hollow. I do these jobs for Arasaka and EBM and MiliTech and other corporations, and I try to think that I'm actually going to subvert them from within. I'm hoping beyond hope that the game will subvert my expectations and actually put the punk into cyberpunk for once. But I fear I won't. Where are the missions for the resistance, fighting to tear down the old order and bring about a new and more beautiful and equitable world? Where are the missions for persecuted minorities? And above all, why does the game assume that my character is in any way sexually attracted to Meredith, the corporate executive who sashays about in her too-tight skirt and heels, as if by degrading herself in such a manner she will be able to smash the glass ceiling that, sadly, is still very much in evidence in Cyberpunk 2077. Linda Sarsour was right. Women like that should have their vaginas taken away. The game glories in objectifying women just as much as it does in fetishising trans* people and dismissing racial conflict. Nothing in this game starts important or timely conversations. It is all just fanservice.
The gunplay also feels flashy and repetitive. The game seems to pander to the tiresome "git gud" culture by throwing enemies at you that the game says is your level, but which clearly are not. I recall having to play one mission thirty-five times not to get killed in the exact same spot. Why is this still a thing in 2020? Why is the most engaging content in the game stuck behind a skill wall? Even when I turned the difficulty down (cue tiresome Real Gamer jokes about journalist mode) I still only just scraped through. I thought given the mountains of accessibility options in Sony's masterpiece The Last Of Us: Part II, we would have put this ableist and elitist mindset behind us by now. But clearly, CDPR didn't get the memo.
It is clear that Cyberpunk 2077 is a labour of love. But that makes it all the more dangerous. CDPR is still behaving and developing like it is 2012. Cyberpunk 2077 features constant microaggressions, a complete lack of relevance to today's society (and in the age of Trump it is all the more important to be actively against racism, sexism, and transmisogyny), and clings to an outdated notion that games should pose a challenge to the player. They needed to do better after The Witcher 3. They need to seriously step up to the plate now, or they will find themselves being overtaken by more socially conscious and less timid developers.
6/10
