Maybe low expectations won the day for me here, but I liked Cyberpunk 2077 despite its many, many hard crashes.

The story is an A- from me and the novelty of missions gets a strong A. Nothing ever felt like a checklist to me, even though I’ve clocked 96 hours inside Night City as of this review; it doesn’t develop Ubisoft Syndrome after 10-20 hours and even the tarot card collection side quest gave me enough of a reward to feel invested in it, to some extent. Though I wish CDPR offered more character customization options and didn’t fall into the trap of mandating that V’s ‘female’ form receive a ‘feminine’ voice and vice versa, I still found myself caring more about their saga than I have with the protagonists in probably any comparable open-world title since Grand Theft Auto V.

The crashes, unfortunately, are still unacceptable right now - though they’re *far* less intrusive on PS5 than PS4 or a mid-spec PC, not enough to make the game unplayable, and frame rate drops are non-existent. If CDPR continues to patch out bugs and add content as they claim they will, I’ll be the first to revisit the game - but until then, it’s a B+ from me.