IGN gave Cyberpunk 2077 a 9/10 after reviewing the version regular humans could not buy.

The math ain't mathing, chooms.

IGN gave Cyberpunk 2077 a 9/10 on December 7, 2020, which is an impressive score for a game most customers had not yet been allowed to experience and, more importantly, for a version of the game that was apparently being guarded in a climate-controlled PC monastery. The review was based on the prestige build: high-end hardware, pre-release access, and the kind of controlled environment where bugs go to wear tuxedos.

Then the public got the console versions and the spreadsheet caught fire.

This is the central statistical crime: IGN's main review awarded a 9/10, then IGN's own last-gen console review later handed out a 4/10. Same title. Same launch window. Same paying audience. Five whole points vanished between platforms like someone opened the score drawer and found a raccoon inside. A 9 and a 4 are not 'different perspectives.' That is a rating system experiencing organ failure.

The review itself does the classic embargo-day ballet: praise the ambition, acknowledge some bugs, then gently step around the giant flashing question mark labeled 'what are normal players actually going to receive?' It calls the city beautiful and dense, which may have been true on the review machine. Unfortunately, a consumer review is not supposed to be a postcard from the one PC in Night City that had health insurance.

Tom Marks did not review a product so much as he reviewed a best-case scenario. That's fine for a tech demo, not for a purchase recommendation blasted across the internet days before launch. If your score requires a hardware caveat, a platform caveat, a patch caveat, and a prayer candle, maybe the number should come with a seatbelt.

A 9/10 told readers: buy with confidence. Reality replied: please wait while textures load, pedestrians duplicate, cops teleport, quests break, and Sony removes the game from the PlayStation Store. That is not a small miss. That is the review equivalent of rating a restaurant five stars because the chef personally fed you in the parking lot while the kitchen was on fire.

We give this review a 2/10. One point for describing the expensive version accurately, one point for eventually being contradicted by its own website, and zero points for remembering that the average consumer does not live inside IGN's benchmark rig.