Cyberpunk 2077 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 Review

While I had just as much fun playing Cyberpunk 2077 on PC as Tom did playing for his review, on the base PlayStation 4 or Xbox One it is a different game entirely. It fails to hit even the lowest bar of technical quality one should expect even when playing on lower-end hardware. It performs so poorly that it makes combat, driving, and what is otherwise a master craft of storytelling legitimately difficult to look at. It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve felt nauseated after playing because of the terrible frame rate. It really is that bad, and it’s very suspicious that CD Projekt Red refused to provide console review copies ahead of launch.

In my original tests on patch 1.02 , frame rate dipped into the teens on Xbox One during key story moments involving combat, and while patch 1.04 promised more stability , it still struggles to maintain 30fps and crashes are still frequent. At best it will regularly crash to the system screen on Xbox One; at worst it’ll hard-lock your system and you have to turn it off and on again.

In short, neither the PS4 or Xbox One is able to hold a steady frame rate, and they often freeze altogether for seconds at a time. On the base model Xbox One, it appears to be running at less than 720p resolution at times (though that fluctuates due to dynamic scaling). Even so, you can expect to see it drop as low as 10 frames per second during combat, which is all but unplayable, and it’s around 20fps even when you’re doing simple and routine things like walking outside in the introduction. The PS4 is slightly better in performance and stability since patch 1.04, but at the sacrifice of texture load-in time. Characters will often appear blocky while you wait an agonizingly long time for their faces to show up to the party, and geometry or textures will sometimes fail to appear even with all the effects like film grain and motion blur turned off.

“ The Xbox One/PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.