When it was first released on the main market, Cyberpunk 2077 was a royal flop. Glitches galore plagued the game so bad, it became the laughingstock and meme fodder of Reddit for a year. Since that time, however, Cyberpunk has been cleaned up code-wise (and glitch attention is now all over Starfield instead). So, why bother talking about Cyberpunk now? Well, aside from the fact that an expansion is now hitting the market (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty), the game is just darn fun to play if you like to solo games a lot or don't have the time to connect regularly with groups in multi-playing.

Set in the landscape of Night City, a decaying prospect of failed modern society in the near future, the main character which you play has to run around solving quests and doing jobs to level up so as to be prepared enough to take on each next step. Okay, pretty basic stuff. Very similar to Destiny in this regard and a lot of other storyline games in the Xbox portfolio. 

However, while the game is constantly pressuring you to keep moving along the plot with an impending death if you don't solve the character's illness, there's a lot one can do just running around and ignoring the plotline entirely. The nice thing about Cyberpunk was that there was at least a good amount of effort put into adding lore, side stories and background details. That in itself makes it fun for those folks who like to play slow and gather up all the nuances versus bulling through to the next level boss match. 

I actually make a point to go after all the little side jobs. Especially in Cyberpunk, most of them have some kind of lore that gives you more background on what's going on in general and what kind of work you've landed in. For the uninitiated, which I'm sure aren't many anymore, the lore is generally provided in the form of shards. This little rectangles are dropped all over the place and give everything from conversations to background history of how the world got turned upside down a few times to get to 2077. There is plenty of mainline plot in the game as well, especially with Johnny Silverhand, but you get to that regardless. The shards are more fun because, depending what you find, you get different nuggets of different sub-stories running around. 

Unfortunately, the overall game setting is pretty depressing, almost enough to push one to a bar. Fortunately, there's a lot of those in the game. Humanity is mucked up, most activity in neighborhoods involves fending off gangs, fighting gangs or being in a gang. And the police are useless. I will say though, if you get the silly idea to become Jason from Friday the 13th and go killing everyone in sight, the city turns on your auto-death feature and just kills you on the sidewalk after too many crimes. That sort of stops you from just being a complete twit in the game to all the NPCs. On the other hand, you'll eventually gain minor criminal status just getting things done, which makes it even more challenging to get around when the police and net scanners are constantly looking for you. 

Unrelated: Sometimes AI cracks me up. I mean seriously, wth is that car doing halfway stuck in the balcony in this image? 

While definitely not a kiddies game due to all the gore, splatter, violence and even sex aspects of future modern society, that's probably not going to stop a bunch of 13-year-olds playing it non-stop until they solve the whole thing. It's not as outright in-your-face violent as Borderlands, but Cyberpunk is pretty close. It's a bit of a Blade Runner/Max Max mashup in some respects. The graphics are nice, and the PC version of the game has even better detail, which is an amazing thing to see when it doesn't glitch (yes, the game still glitches now and then). In any case, while it's a bit dated now, I'm still enjoying Cyberpunk after playing it for three months. And now that there's an extension (Phantom Liberty), I'll probably play it for another year at my slow pace. It's a hell of trip from the old Atari days when I was a kid.