I'm sure that even if you never played Cyberpunk 2077 you recall how Keanu Reeves was heavily involved in the promotion of the game long before it was even released. At the time I remember being excited about his involvement in the game, just like everyone else it seems, because Keanu is one of those celebrities that you can't help but like.
I say this as someone who likes the guy but also is realistic about his acting abilities in that I don't think that he is a good actor. He is one of those guys that gets good roles probably because of his relationship with directors and producers but honestly, he is a very wooden actor and all of his roles basically seem the same. That being said his blockbuster movies like John Wick and of course the Matrix films are pretty damn awesome. Also, the fact that he seems like a genuine cool dude IRL makes him pretty special in the celebrity world.
When you do finally "meet" him in Cyberpunk, which at least in my storyline is about 10% of the way through the game, it is a very welcome change to the gameplay even though it does involve a TON of loading sequences.
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I'm not going to spoil what Johnny's involvement as a character means to the game, mostly because I don't fully know it yet and I think that is the point. Pieces of his involvement are probably going to be slowly revealed as the game carries on but it is clear that he is a central character in the entire game and world that you find yourself in during Cyberpunk's entirety.
A mission that you are on in the "Street Punk" storyline - which is the one I initially took, where you have to infiltrate some building with your buddy and things go horribly awry during this mission. At first I thought I had just seriously screwed up the mission objectives but upon further research I found that it is actually very difficult if not impossible to get through this mission without it blowing up the way it did with my playthrough. Regardless of how you handle it, it ends up with the same end-result that has you getting shoved into a "flashback" with you in the eyes and body of Johnny Silverhand and controlling him as a character.
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One of the things you'll notice about Johnny when you first start combat with him is that he is dramatically stronger than your own original character and his main weapons, called the "Malorian Arms" is absolutely outstanding and will eventually make you feel a bit shit about your own armaments once you go back to them. He is also capable of taking much more damage than your own character and well, he's basically a bad ass, as you would expect.
This sequence of events in the flashback is my favorite part of the game so far and everything about it is straight up awesome. The way in which he is OP as hell is really fun and I think you would have to work pretty hard to not win this mission. He "one shots" all the enemies that he encounters to the point where I found myself screwing around and going for glory kills almost immediately. I'm pretty sure this is by design and is meant as a little bit of a break from the usual playstyle which at least for me and my toon had been a case of needing to plug all enemies with huge amounts of bullets to get a single kill. Johnny killed nearly all enemies I encountered with just a single, not-even-nicely-placed shot.
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This is all really fun and while I wont disclose what it is, it completely changes the dynamic and overall story of the game as you know it up to this point. I haven't done much since after completing this very easy portion of the game that is clearly meant to show that Johnny is a force to be reckoned with, but I am looking forward to progressing from this point even though I am still quite upset at the amount of loading that this game in general entails.
My opinion of Cyberpunk up to this point remains the same as it was a few hours ago: It's a good game but with some really huge flaws most of which revolve around what I consider to be extremely excessive loading times. I also still feel as though this is a PC game that was poorly ported to consoles. This game was clearly designed to be played on a monitor that is 2 feet from your face and not on a television on the other side of the room.
I'll keep plugging away at it though since it is basically the only "epic" release that is in my library at the moment.