Cyberpunk 2077 Review

Anthony Kuczynski

December 2020

Like the many other fans that had been anticipating Cyberpunk 2077, I was dismayed by the broken state of the game on the PlayStation 4. On launch day, I received Cyberpunk 2077 along with its plethora of glitches and its dismal frame rate that seems to constantly hover around a mere 20 FPS*. The visual fidelity of Cyberpunk is laughable, being similar to a game running on the much older PS2 console.

The optics surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 from the PS4 community would be accordingly bleak. After spending 60 dollars on a dysfunctional game, many of the last-gen console owners that had purchased Cyberpunk 2077 were holding feelings of indignation towards the game’s developers, CD Projekt Red. This resulted in an upsurge of memes making fun of Cyberpunk’s lackluster performance on last-gen consoles like the PS4.

While the game’s performance on the PS4 is dreadful, it’s a different story entirely when the game runs on PC. Though it still has numerous bugs, Cyberpunk 2077 on the PC has vastly better graphics and a frame rate that easily averages around 50 FPS.

The disparity in quality between the PC and PS4 editions of the game is clearly expressed in the average user scores collected by Metacritic. The PS4 edition of Cyberpunk 2077 maintains a meager user score of 3.3 out of 10, while the PC edition of the game is given a whopping user score of 7.1 - more than doubling the PS4 edition’s score. Overall, the evaluation of those playing Cyberpunk 2077 on PC is mostly positive.

Due to public outcry about the broken state of Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS4, Sony personally removed the game from stores and offered refunds to the players who bought the game digitally. It's saddening to see such a beloved company tarnish the goodwill that they had built up with gamers with the horrid release of Cyberpunk 2077.

* FPS: Frames per second (the number of times the picture on the screen is re-drawn in one second)