This book felt like the game but then as a novel in all the right ways.

To start off I will say I absolutely love the Cyperpunk 2077 game and that was a huge motivation to request this book on Netgalley. I have however not finished that game and stopped playing when my life was a bit too busy. Now with the Phantom Liberty DLC coming up I'm holding back starting over but that might have to wait a while because I currently do not own a PS5 to play on. I did however get to try out the DLC at Gamescom while I was still reading this book and both of them made me even more hyped up for the other, for the DLC to come out and to see where No Coincidence would bring the story to. But for all the gamers reading my review, if you loved the story and everything else in the game you will enjoy this book just the same.

For the gamers as well it's good to know that the narrator is the voice for female V. I actually did not play as female V so the voice wasn't as familiar as it would for some of you, but it was a very fun thing they did. As a negative comment I have to say I sometimes struggled a bit with her articulation but I felt that it got progressively better towards the end of the book and I had no issues with that anymore when I finished.

Then about the book, this book confused me at first. There is no single main character or single POV. The whole gang is the main character as a collective and you get POV parts from all of them. This adds a lot to the book however as you can follow how each of them have in true Night City style, their own motives and agenda's that don't line up the slightest. To see all of these points in the story progress together is a lot of fun and having this extra knowledge adds a lot of interesting moments to the book.

Then the cast is quite diverse in what kind of people are within the gang. What they all have in common though is that none of them have done a heist before when the book jumps right into their first at the start of the book. They're all rookies and basically have no idea what they're doing. I liked this a lot because it brings huge power plays into the books where things are unbalanced and add a lot of drama. They slowly find their way but things get progressively more complicated as one leads to another thing in Night City. It was fun seeing them trying to make sense of it all and get themselves in order again, especially when that is usually quite impossible.

What is fun as well is that Dum Dum from the main game is part of this book and there are even some POV points for him and the Maelstorm. It made the book connect a lot more to the game and the tie in was a nice added thing.

The gunfights in the book were a lot of fun too and I really enjoyed them. They were high action and heated moments. It felt like there was always something to loose and it was a lot of fun to see them squeeze out impossible binds to make it out alive. There was also a nice balance with how many of them were in the book alternating slower paced moments with action scenes. The dynamic in the fights kept changing too because the further along the book I got the more the crew knew how to handle weapons and fight so every fight felt quite different from the one before.

In conclusion this was a very fun book and I'm happy to see this universe is branching out to literature media too.


I received an audio ARC through Netgalley and this was my honest review.