Three things to understand about current ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ reviews

The Cyberpunk 2077 reviews are here, and it’s one of the highest-scoring games of the year with 91 on Metacritic, which should be enough to appease most fans. And yet this whole review situation has been a bit strange.

I don’t mean there’s something that needs to necessarily bring that score down, but there are a number of points about what you’re reading in current reviews that should probably be understood from the beginning. Three in particular, as far as I can tell.

1. The status of patches on revision copies is somewhat unclear

Many of the reviews, even the positive ones, show many, many huge bugs that occur in Cyberpunk 2077 in its current state, but there are mixed reports on how similar the review build will be to the final build. Some reviewers say they didn’t receive a day 0/1 patch, but others apparently remember downloading a huge file meant to emulate some of the fixes in that patch. But this was a patch copy version of the game in a private GOG setting, so it’s unclear how similar the PC game copy will be in terms of bugs instead, or what will have been fixed in the launching. So in short, it’s unclear if some of the worst bugs, particularly towards the end of the game, will carry over or if there will be more important fixes in time.

2. All images in current reviews are B-Roll

While there are plenty of cinematic and gameplay footage from Cyberpunk already, all you’re seeing in video reviews up to this point is B-roll stock footage, which turned out to be one of the stipulations of the review.

What this means is that reviews can only talk about the types of bugs they were experiencing, as mentioned above, and they can’t show them along with their video reviews. I think the door to the actual game video is up tomorrow before release, so it will be the first “real” look at the game footage when the recorded video is released and things like Let’s Plays start. But just so you know.

3. How the game plays on all consoles is totally unknown

Every prerelease copy of Cyberpunk 2077 is for PC. That may end up being the biggest platform for the game, and yet it brings us to launch with no idea how the game works on PS4, Xbox One, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S (and Stadia!).

Cyberpunk isn’t the first game to only have PC review copies, but it does put console players in a bit of a weird place. Will the game work well enough to be acceptable on next-gen consoles (even if it was technically designed for them?), How much better does the jump to the next gen improve? We just don’t know, and won’t know until launch, or unless we find the few people who got the first retail copies by accident (and their games may not be properly patched yet).

Again, I do not think that this information significantly changes or changes the game review scores and in any case if it is said plus Bugs are fixed for retail launch, product could be even better. But I think it’s good to know all this from the beginning.

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