The new Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay is finally here, and it's sweet satisfaction for everyone who was waiting for more specifics on not just what the game looks like but how you can play it. Developer CD Projekt Red shared just over 14 minutes of gameplay - pulled from the same demos it shared at E3 and Gamescom - offering looks at the game's combat, hacking, dialogue. It even teases a little bit more of your relationship with Johnny Silverhand, AKA digital ghost Keanu Reeves.
The demo starts off in Night City's Pacifica District, with main character V on a job for the Voodoo Boys gang. The Voodoo Boys are expert hackers - AKA netrunners - and they want to know how another gang, the musclebound Animals, got their hands on some impressive tech. Just because the Voodoo Boys take the hands-off, high-tech approach doesn't mean V has to. The demo showed two approaches: one for Strong Solos, and one for Netrunners.
The Strong Solo approach felt more like a typical shooter, with V stomping down corridors and shooting holes in dozens of enemies. They have some cool abilities on top of the usual guns-blazing stuff: super strength allows them to force open doors (who needs keys) and even tear the gun out of an automatic turret and turn it against the Animals. If you prefer, you could opt for a Fast Solo build instead that focuses on more agile combat, though CD Projekt Red didn't show that.
The Netrunner path was more subtle but no less violent. Using a hacking minigame that involves matching data sets to get more and more permissions over a system, V was able to short circuit a bench press machine so it dropped several hundred pounds onto the neck of its user. They could even hack directly into enemies to explode the cyberware in their bodies. Stealthy doesn't mean peaceful!
Oh, and as for Johnny Silverhand? He may be a digital ghost who lives in your brain, but you don't have to do everything he says. If you can bring yourself to make Keanu Reeves mad at you, I mean.
Cyberpunk 2077 will let you do a no-kill run if you can keep yourself from hacking boxing robots into beating people's brains out.
