As many of you might have noticed, there are a LOT of reviews out there for Cyberpunk 2077, a lot of them a bit… controversial… to say the least. A lot of these reviews dropped just a couple of days before the game went live to the public, so where is the review from The Outerhaven? Well, a lot of what has happened has been discussed between Keith Mitchell and me on a recent episode of The Spectator Mode Podcast (Which you should be listening to or watching anyway), I figured you need to know what exactly is going on.
As mentioned on The Spectator Mode Podcast, I have been down for a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 ever since I sat down and did an interview for the game back in 2019 at PAX Australia. Now, I’ve been in a good relationship with the Australian distributor of Cyberpunk 2077 for about 8 years now, doing everything that they ask me to do, right down to reviewing games I never asked for. I’m more than happy to do that since we do value our publishing partners. However, this time around, for some reason, The Outerhaven was left out of the initial early review period, and luckily all the bullshit that happened due to the clauses in the Cyberpunk 2077 NDA contract that only allowed websites to use official screenshots, provided B-Roll footage, and other conditions that have created a lot of controversial reviews on the internet.
Well, we did get codes to review… On release day.
Keith got a code, and I also got a code, both of which seem to be for the game’s PC version. But what happened on launch day was that I, along with other members of The Outerhaven staff, and the general public, went out and bought a copy with our own money. I purchased a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 for PlayStation 4, which I reserved over a year ago. Now, at the time of writing, I have spent some time with the PlayStation 4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 and have yet to start up the PC version (Probably going to fix that by the time you’re reading this).
So this places us in a position where we are very far behind the 8-ball when it comes to content creation. Keith is handling the guides and video content that you’ll be seeing on our YouTube channel over the coming days, and I will be handling the review that you will eventually see. Cyberpunk 2077 is a very big game, with three different avenues of character types to play through, and with each playthrough coming in, on average, at about 30+ hours each, that’s a lot of content to cover. So as you can begin to believe, it’s going to be a while till we are ready to publish a full review, as people should know that we do not publish a review without a couple of key conditions being met:
- The game has had enough time to get a good grasp of everything.
- The game is in a playable state on the platform we review it on.
- We can tell you our honest thoughts and opinions about it.
At this point in time, Cyberpunk 2077 only meets the third condition listed above. We can tell you honest thoughts and opinions about the game since no one on The Outerhaven signed an NDA contract before or upon getting our review codes. But this is not enough as we still need to play the game enough to get a true feel for it, and also we would like to see the technical side of the game be improved to a point at which Cyberpunk 2077 is playable on both PC and console since we have copies for both.
But at this time, I will tell you that Cyberpunk 2077, on consoles, is a complete mess and not worth buying or putting effort into. By now, you would have seen many articles about how technically bad the game is, with clipping issues, crashes, bugs, and other things going on with both console and PC copies of Cyberpunk 2077. What makes things worse is that, on consoles, Cyberpunk 2077 got a Day 1 patch of around 46Gb in size, combined with the install of the game itself, which was already 58Gb in size. The PC version doesn’t have this large patch but received a 286Mb patch this morning.
Currently, Cyberpunk 2077 is NOT worth buying on consoles as it’s going to take a lot of patches and updates in order to get it to even the most basic of playable states on any consoles. Even the PlayStation 5, which I’m playing my console copy on (A PlayStation 4 copy as the PlayStation 5 edition won’t arrive till 2021), doesn’t help improve a lot of the technical issues Cyberpunk 2077 has. It has me thinking, for the first time since the PlayStation 2 era, of taking the game back to where I bought it from and asking for a full refund, which I can do under EB Games Level 4 membership and also the Australian Consumer Law, which states refunds can be given if a product is unable to meet its function, which Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation does not.
So there you have it. This is why we don’t have a Cyberpunk 2077 review out right now, nor anytime soon, and what I think of the console versions so far. Thank you.
