Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition - Chrome Console (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 52 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition
Released: September 26th, 2023 (original), June 5th, 2025 (Switch 2)
Developer: CD Projekt
Publisher: CD Projekt
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch 2 (reviewed), Xbox X/S
I didn’t play Cyberpunk 2077 when it first released, having been so exhausted by its parade of controversies that I simply couldn’t be bothered. It wouldn’t be until a few years later that I finally gave it a go and liked it - long enough that it had been greatly improved from its legendarily broken launch state.
Improved, but certainly not immaculate.
Viewed after the dust has settled, Cyberpunk 2077 is an enthralling game with an impressive amount of meat on its bones, marrying great writing to deliciously empowering combat. With the Ultimate Edition launching alongside Nintendo’s funny Switch 2, I spent a lot more time with it than I had in the past, and it’s an expenditure I don’t regret.
Though of course, bugs are still prevalent. In fact, it was the very first Switch 2 game I played and it crashed just after an hour. Quite a poor first impression of both the game and the console it was showing off. While it’s not as broken as that impression led me to believe, there remain some years-old issues that haven’t been fixed.
Cyberpunk 2077 has been my most played game on Nintendo’s new system, which might speak to the lack of truly new games available. Cynicism aside, I ought not diminish how absorbing CD Projekt’s work is. It’s been my most played game in general, as of late.
Maybe I just can’t get enough of Keanu Reeves. He could take a lot more than my breath.
It’s a great game however you slice it, as well as truly vast. Night City and its surroundings are geographically immense, but it’s the depth that really stands out. There are so many plot threads, additional quests, and optional encounters, most of them well worth exploring.
While the main story is fine enough, the stuff that spins off from it is full of gold. As grimy and corrupt as Night City is, 2077 makes sure to populate it with some really likable characters so as to keep things from getting too cynical. Allies like Judy Alvarez and Panam are written and performed really well, fleshing out a cast of people I care about rather than cardboard props.
That said, there is a massive heaping of neon sleaze, because what cyberpunk world would be complete without it? A corporate dystopia with a dildo on every street corner is what we expect and CDP provides it by the pussyload. The smut market is so prolific that it can actually become exhausting - I never thought I’d get tired of orgasms, but the billboards just won't stop moaning at me.
Not that I can pretend to be too far above it. Hand me a Photo Mode alongside a smorgasbord of sex shops and I’ll waste a pathetic amount of time entertaining myself with immature shenanigans.
A fascinating aspect to the portrayal of Night City is how 2077 at once nails and flubs LGBTQ+ rep. The way character creation ties voice to gender sucks, and a certain notorious in-game billboard is asinine, but V’s other physical options and the prevalence of queer relationships is welcome indeed.
I really respect how V’s potential love interests aren’t all pansexual despite being so myself. I’m sad I don’t get to date Panam, but NPCs feel more fleshed out for the agency. They’re more than love dolls for players to strategize into bed, emphasized by how relationships unfold purely by following the vibes in dialogue. Love’s not a clinical system with points to score.
One of the most refreshing things about 2077 is how little it relies on copypasta busywork to fill out its massive map. Even unimportant side gigs are thoughtfully structured, and the many Cyberpsycho hunts find unique ways to build up to their miniboss fights. Such activities all have little stories, lending some extra weight to them.
The closest you get to true filler are nondescript Crime events that litter the map, just small gaggles of enemies waiting to be killed. With so much else on offer, Crimes serve more as a convenient avenue to let off steam or test weapons, yet even these throwaway encounters can lead to extra content or worldbuilding opportunities.
I bagged on Cyberpunk for how broken it was when it launched - and not incorrectly - but unlike some other busted RPGs on the market, I can at least say this one is genuinely ambitious. It’s densely packed, deeply populated, and it actually fixed its shit.
As a power fantasy RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t afraid to offer players a lot of power. Although they start off as a rather squishy protagonist, V can become a terrifying force of violence long before the adventure concludes, opening up to all manner of devastating weapons and particularly vicious abilities.
In a world where everybody is cybered up from all the cyber they’ve been cybering, speccing into Intelligence to become a Netrunner is essentially playing god.
Remotely fucking with enemies via Quickhacks can trivialize combat in many ways, but it’s so fun I don’t give a shit. You can screw with enemies’ eyes, shut down their legs, glitch their weapons, melt them from the inside, force them to shoot their own fucking heads, and every option is reliable in a fight. Not only can Quickhacks support a ton of playstyles, hacking’s a playstyle unto itself.
That’s not to say other options are lacking. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the rare action RPGs in which I find stealth a fun avenue to go down. Investing in Reflexes to slow time or dash around is also entertaining, while the Tech tree lets you fill yourself with cyber of your own so you can cyber everyone’s cyber with your cybering until they’re cybered.
I do like a game that isn’t afraid to let its players become overpowered if it can avoid being boring as a consequence, and I can say it took me over 90 hours before I started to feel fatigued by the chaos I could cause. That’s a ridiculously good innings, and I was still invested enough to keep playing further.
There are some areas in which I would’ve liked to see Night City fight back more aggressively.
Enemy Netrunners, for example, are both rare and self-defeating, their attempts to Quickhack you being nothing more than a flagged opportunity to trace and hack them back. Counterhacking can even be done through walls, making your would-be attacker extra vulnerable. A Netrunner should be downright terrifying, especially if you’re all chromed up, but they’re almost free XP.
Most bosses will go down easy, nothing can counter the invisibility you get from Octocamo Cyberware, and you have enough hacks to effortlessly negate whatever’s thrown at you. It’s a dynamic not everybody will find much mileage in. Still, as much as I would’ve liked at least a few things to be scared of, I can’t deny how much I love the overwhelming force I bring to a firefight. My own mileage is just fine.
The Ultimate Edition comes packed with the Phantom Liberty DLC, offering the new location of Dogtown and a hot lot of Idris Elba. While 2077’s main story takes much from noir detective stories, Phantom Liberty is a Bond-style spy thriller. It’s good stuff.
I think Phantom Liberty’s main campaign is honestly bloody fantastic, some of the best writing CDP’s ever showcased. As well as memorable missions, such as infiltrating a lavish party hosted by arc baddie Kurt Hansen, there’s such an absorbing level of intrigue between characters that my perspective was regularly challenged.
Never before has a game convinced me to change my mind on a crucial decision multiple times, and I don’t mean I was torn between choices - my mind was firmly decided before events unfolded in a way that caused me to hard pivot, only for later revelations to inspire another pivot. The story even accounts for you wanting to switch sides at more than one juncture.
That’s better than good game writing. Truly exemplary roleplaying opportunities.
2077 isn’t the circus of breakages it used to be, but V’s many in-universe glitches are nonetheless joined by plenty of real ones. A ton of them are benign, with physics issues often providing some comedy, but problems such as getting trapped in menus or events failing to trigger are less negligible. Full-on crashes are uncommon, but not rare enough to escape mention.
Far more frequent is the need to reload saves when various commands suddenly stop working. Remotely summoning cars is the worst offender, but I’ve had to fix a number of combat effects this way too. Another problem is random stuff being flagged as quest items and becoming permanent fixtures of the inventory as a result.
More aggravating to me than the accidents, however, is the retention of some nonsensical design decisions that have been criticized for years.
Crafting is a strangely unfulfilling process. You can craft common weapons from blueprints, but you’ll find hundreds of them while playing and they’ll be all sorts of fun colors. The drab ones you can make have a full suite of empty mod slots, but that’s hardly exciting. Mods can’t be crafted, only upgraded. Attachments can’t be upgraded, only crafted at the most basic, quickly obsolete level.
Why does fully upgrading certain things do nothing to alter their stats or effects? Why is the system like this?
You can’t upgrade any basic weapons even if you craft and mod them to your liking, because only Iconic weapons are upgradeable. These legendary armaments come with powerful bonuses and render basic ones redundant. Since you can’t attach mods to Iconic weapons, their use makes an entire category of equipment useless.
Quickhacks may be awesome, but the menu for using them is fucking terrible.
Hacks are applied during combat by scrolling through the ones you’ve equipped, and you can’t freely sort them for ease of selection. Instead, the last one you equip is always stuck at the top, so if you want them a certain way you have to manually equip every single one in reverse order. Oh, and if you want to swap one out, the whole order gets fucked.
Whyyyyyyyyy?
One thing I really hate is how often I’ll have my active mission automatically overwritten by another. I started getting really annoyed by phone calls because of how often they’d presumptively change my map routes. Also, just as a personal whinge, I dislike the restrictive number of scannable vehicle paint jobs you can save, and how scanning too many will overwrite your first slot even if you don’t want to - the cancel and confirm buttons are the same button!
CD Projekt really needs to start respecting the fact that not everybody plays games inches away from a PC monitor. Even if you maximize UI sizes, Cyberpunk has a ton of ridiculously tiny text. This is especially ignorant considering we’re talking about the Switch 2 version - you’d sooner make out a tattoo on an ant’s nutsack than comfortably read this text on a handheld screen.
For as detailed as my complaints are, I feel compelled to point out that I’ve only gotten so deep in my annoyance because of how deeply attached to the game I’ve become. I could rant about Quickhacks and crafting all day, but I have 100+ hours of exposure behind my demagoguery. Thing is, even at my most irritated, I was still more entertained by Cyberpunk 2077 than by most games in its pricing bracket.
Even though I want to struggle justifying its full price after all these years, if we compare the Ultimate Edition to any game that’s had the nerve to charge $70 these past five years, Cyberpunk 2077 has it beat in terms of quality, content, and consistency of entertainment. Compared to the $80 ones? It makes a mockery of them.
Ultimate Edition works as a solid showcase of the Switch 2’s capabilities, at least between the occasional crash. It generally runs great, and playing such a massive production in handheld mode is a hell of a novelty. You can use the Joy-cons to activate commands via gestures, though as usual with such things, gyro’s best used for a little refinement while aiming.
Whether on the Switch 2 or not, Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic RPG, especially after years of bodywork, and it has some of the best storytelling you’ll get out of the “AAA” space. I’ve played it so intently that I don’t even cringe when I hear cyberslang like “choom” and “preem” anymore.
Can’t think of a more nova endorsement than that, ya gonk!
9/10
