I came into this game with low expectations: after the launch fiasco and the subsequent reviews and experiences, I ended up waiting two years to finally play... and I found it surprisingly solid.

Worth noting that two years is a long time to brush up on what went wrong, and still, I came across plenty of it. After the introductory quest, I transitioned seamlessly into the intro cutscene that sets up V's beginning in Night City, and for the first couple of seconds... everyone was T-posing. This far gone from its release, it's mind-boggling how it still happened.
There is a lot of empty life in Night City; even while I write this review, with the trailers auto-playing on the store page, there is a clear distinction between the tone that *that* Cyberpunk seemed to have, and what the current product has. It is clear that certain areas lacked polish, with some quests feeling anti-climatic, but those that worked, they did so brilliantly, setting the tone in such an evocative way that I felt compelled to keep going.

A lot of the tropes present in the Cyberpunk genre and North-American centric pulp fiction are solidified in Cyberpunk 2077, in the best and worst of ways. There is a lot hidden beneath the surface, and even when you dig deep, some of the interactions with seemingly shallow characters leave you feeling unsatisfied. In the matters of narrative, it's obvious that focus was placed on certain relationships and even romances, more than others. Highly marketed missions and characters are most of what they were set out to be, but in between audacious sequences, a lot of minor jobs and side-quests pale in comparison. Regardless, the combat and atmosphere felt engaging enough that I saw past those experiences... for the most part.

Cue-in the shock-value scenes and twists. There is a certain expectation held up to a game like Cyberpunk and its genre, but it's by no means an excuse to release some of its contents, or use certain tropes or twists as crutches of poor narrative design. The fetishisation of transpeople, the NPC barks referring to sexual assault after defeating me, the ridiculous amount of sexual violence depicted against predominantly women; under the allure of a more progressive society, Night City is as decadent a satire as it is a lie: the City of Dreams is indeed the City of Nightmares, and it doesn't hide it. One could say that these monstrous and gratuitous instances are on purpose--a juxtaposition of what is promised and what is given, but regardless of us playing a fictional character going through a fictional story, the ramifications and consequences of shock-oriented portrayals of these issues are felt by players, not characters.