Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Can't Escape The Game’s Juvenile Personality

thegamer.com:

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners isn’t quite the Studio Trigger masterpiece I was hoping for. It’s still great, and a worthwhile expansion of CD Projekt Red’s world filled with style, violence, and provocation, but doesn’t always stick the landing. It feels completely in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077, for better and for worse.

Fans will find a lot to love here, but for me, I was hoping for a story and characters with greater substance and purpose. Instead, the finished product was somewhat meandering, unsure how to cement its own identity in the shadow of a game once destined to rule the world. With only a single expansion to come side projects are now its unexpected lifeblood.

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Studio Trigger is renowned for excess and exuberance, but throughout the ten episodes it so often feels nailed down, like it wants to do more or tell a deeper story but is never given the capacity to do so. It also falls victim to immaturity and a surface-level approach to Cyberpunk that never really has much to say. Corporations are bad, but haven’t we moved on from that?

David Martinez and his unlikely crew of allies are all born of unfair circumstances. Some were raised on the poverty line, and learned to work the streets to rise above ridicule and make a living for themselves. Others were kept prisoner in laboratories, groomed to become living weapons of corrupt executives and the military industrial complex. All of them have been dealt a bad hand, so their coming together should represent an ideological collective.

Edgerunners does broach upon that vision on occasion. David is told that no matter how much cyberware he outfits himself with and no matter how far he