CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk is a critical hit despite glitches

Reviewers are mostly high on Cyberpunk 2077, the hotly anticipated role-playing game from CD Projekt SA that features the actor Keanu Reeves. But despite eight years of development and three release delays, the critical consensus is that the game could have used more time in the oven.

While most video game companies put out new games every year or two, this is CD Projekt's first major release since 2015's the Witcher 3, raising the stakes for the Polish gaming giant. Ahead of the Dec. 10 release of Cyberpunk 2077, game reviews were published Monday, lauding its ambition and emotional weight but criticizing the glut of bugs.

Gene Park at the Washington Post called the writing an "engaging thrill ride" but lamented that it is "boiling over with glitches." IGN reviewer Tom Marks described it as "one of the most exciting, emotional and just plain fun RPGs I've played in recent years" but detailed bugs including objects failing to load, progress getting halted and his character's hair disappearing.

As of Monday afternoon, the game had a 91 out of 100 rating on the review aggregation website Metacritic, with 43 publications counted, although that score is likely to change as more reviews are published. Early reviewers were only given access to the game on computers rather than the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, on which the game is not expected to perform as capably. A YouTube personality who goes by the name Skill Up said he held his review because CD Projekt placed an unusual demand that publishers' videos only include footage distributed by the company.

The release of Cyberpunk caps a difficult year for the employees of CD Projekt, many of whom had been working long hours and mandatory six-day weeks in order to finish the game and fix bugs. Critics of this excessive overtime, which the video game industry calls "crunch," have suggested that exhausted employees may cause more glitches than they actually fix.

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