Cyberpunk 2077 Really Is As Broken As They Say

I was warned about just how buggy and unpolished Cyberpunk 2077 would be on consoles. I thought playing the PS4 version of the game on my PS5 would (somehow) just brute force the issues away, that I wouldn’t look through doors into other dimensions, the NPCs wouldn’t transform into other people, and that the game wouldn’t crash around 5000 times.

I was wrong to be so naive. I’ve played my fair share of AAA open world games over the years, yet I can comfortably say Cyberpunk 2077 is among the most broken. I remember how bad The Witcher 3 was at launch, and despite how many people are using the 2015 game as an example of how CD Projekt Red could turn it around, they just aren’t comparable — Roach’s wacky legs have nothing on this mess.

It’s so poorly optimised, in fact, that it’s almost become disaffecting the more I play. I’ve come to expect and eventually even time when the game would crash on my PS5, usually when it tries to do more than one thing at once after an hour or two of playtime. I often think “this should crash soon” and lo, it usually does. And then I shake my head and start again.

Crashes are one thing, but the amount of glitches I’ve come across in Cyberpunk boggle my mind. I put together a compilation of glitches I’ve encountered during my time with Cyberpunk 2077 that are as varied as they are numerous, which you can check out above. I was pretty surprised to find my clips folder — which consisted only of the bugs that I’d remembered to save — held 43 files.

It’s an absolute carousel of nonsense that just seems to happen over and over again, especially as the game starts to sag when you discover and unlock more of Night City’s world. A lot of them are silly, like enemies flying into the sky getting stuck inside cars, but there’s just as many UI and audio bugs that need you to reload your save to shake off. For an action RPG that aims to be immersive, it’s not a great look.

So, what’s behind all this? Well, the game just isn’t ready, not even close. There’s a lack of polish to almost every aspect of Cyberpunk, from the balancing to the animations to so much in-between. You can even almost sense the ghosts of cut content whenever you drive around Night City, this unshakeable feeling that there’s stuff missing. Surely I should care about these gangs, what’s the point of them? Why can the NPCs play the arcade cabinets and I can’t? How come I can’t call Delamain to drive me about and chat? And which portal do these goddamn police keep pouring through?

Make no mistake, Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely still a good game, sometimes even great, but if CDPR had just taken a few more months of QA all without crunch, maybe the discourse would be more about penis sizes and less about everything else.

Cyberpunk 2077 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

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