I’ll let you in on a secret, and that is that I think Cyberpunk 2077 is a decent enough game, but it annoys you by getting in its own way all the time. An example of this is the setting Night City itself. It’s a cracking city to have a wander around. I like how the districts really feel different, I like the strange warrens that are the multi-level covered street markets, I like the huge, hollow-centred blocks of flats that make playing the game like being inside that brilliant Judge Dredd movie (starring Karl Urban’s chin as Dredd). Night City is a marvellous, filthy monstrosity to explore, and this remains true as long as you don’t look at anything at ground level.
This is because when you look at ground level you see all the vans with pop-in textures, duplicate NPCs, NPCs spawning in and then disappearing again when you turn your back, cops that start shooting at you if you bump into them and then forget where you are if you move 30 feet away, palm trees that lean over like they’re screaming, and so on. Mostly, ground level is where the AI happens, and the AI is currently… not great. But if you look up the whole time, you see lovely pillars of concrete and neon, and everything is okay again. Observe some of my favourite views from Night City: