Wagner James Au / New World Notes

If you're one of the many millions waiting for the new open world game Cyberpunk 2077 (I'm debating making the massive download myself), the hands-on reviews are starting to be published — and so far, they seem to lean but positive but mixed.  Pros: Beautiful open world, fun gameplay. Cons: Buggy, not as open as it seems at first, and negatively retro story/politics. Then again every reviewer however seems happy with Keanu. Samples:

It’s a good thing “Cyberpunk 2077” gets so many details right, because in its current prelaunch state, it’s … what you’d expect from a launch CDPR game. Before “Witcher 3” became the darling of the industry, it was released in a famously buggy state. “Cyberpunk 2077” continues this tradition despite seven years in development, several delays and worrying reports of overtime crunch…

The artificial intelligence here likely factors into the overall jank of the game. Enemies and allies alike have no discernible combat tactics besides point and shoot and die. The boss encounters fare even worse, becoming a mess of mechanics as they flip around and do all kinds of things you wish you could. Just as “Witcher 3” didn’t set the world on fire with its battle mechanics, neither will “Cyberpunk 2077.” — Gene Park, Washington Post

More samples below:

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of the past and its forgotten futures. Its setting is a pastiche that was overtaken by history and technology. It is a piece of software that is a throwback to PC gaming of the 1990s and early 2000s in every possible way, and its aesthetic and narrative sensibilities of a teenage boy's bedroom in the 1980s. Yet its lavish and utterly sincere devotion to its influences recalls what has made these dated visions so alluring and enduring. Cyberpunk is too tacky and graceless to be cool, but it's very big, and very loud, and sometimes that's all it takes to be awesome…

At first glance Cyberpunk 2077 is an almost grating homage to familiar touchstones of 80s cyberpunk and dystopian fiction, throwing together premises and aesthetics that don't even really complement each other in a game whose ugliness only seems partly intentional. In my first 30 minutes with the game, I'd taken a flying car across the California megalopolis of Night City to a VR dance club, been thrown out of my job with sinister Japanese megacorp Arasaka for meddling in Machiavellian internal politics, rescued a woman from kidnappers who were harvesting organs and cybernetic implants from their victims, and gotten a new apartment in a colossal tenement building straight out of Dredd's Megacity One, where the bathroom had the three seashells of Demolition Man next to the toilet. Where The Witcher 3 transcended or subverted familiar genre tropes, Cyberpunk 2077 seems like it wants to drown you in them. — Rob Zacny, Vice

It always seemed strange to me that a game which depends so much on sci-fi tropes from literally 40 years ago could somehow the Year's Hottest Game. Anyway, another thoughtful review:

This is what I least expected about Cyberpunk 2077: that its notions of “cool” are so tied up in the digital persona of a past-his-prime rocker that the game sometimes feels like looking through your uncle’s musty record collection while he talks about how great the Rolling Stones are. When William Gibson’s genre-defining novels like Neuromancer and Count Zero first appeared in the mid-’80s, they were thrilling in part because they offered a vision of the future that felt entirely new, and with it, a whole new vision of “cool.” I believe there’s still potential for cyberpunk stories to be so boldly visionary and relevant, but Cyberpunk 2077 prefers to look back, an attitude reflected not just through Johnny’s efforts to avenge old grudges and to recapture the glory days of his band Samurai. In fact, the game’s entire worldview feels like the product of someone who’s about 30 years behind the times, who may have been rebellious and liberated once but who nowadays doesn’t understand why it’s messed up to call sex workers “whores,” as Johnny routinely does…

One of my fears about Cyberpunk 2077 was that it was going to be so cynical and nihilistic that playing it would be like wallowing in grim hopelessness, that the cheapness of human life in the game’s world would be mirrored by the game itself. But that’s not the case. It’s easy to lose the human thread in the overwhelming glut of stuff Cyberpunk 2077 puts on your plate, with your map plastered with crimes you can violently “neutralize” for a reward from the police, and fixers constantly sending you text messages about underdeveloped one-off jobs you can take on to earn a bit of extra cash. But the humanity is there, if you look for it. — Caroyln Petit, Polygon

Pictured: Not only Keanu's avatar in Cyberpunk 2077 but an avatar in Second Life that's a tribute to Keanu's avatar in Cyberpunk 2077.