System Override

Blurb

What do you get when you cross nanomachines controlled by a volatile AI with a bleeding edge military-grade cybernetic implant and a gutter rat out to prove everyone wrong?

A forced experimental drug treatment at an early age has saddled David with an immense burden.

His mother’s insistence on his current lifepath as a corpo has done much the same.

David is a speeding ball of fire hurtling towards an unknown destination, and his mother’s death has left him adrift and unsure of his direction.

So he does what any teenager with no more cares left to give does—he chips in some mil-spec chrome and looks for a quick way to earn edds, all the while learning to utilize the nanotechnology that had been forced on him as a child—finding out the immense potential within him as a result.

Corpo or Edgerunner? Why not both? And why not the best of both while we’re at it?

Top of Arasaka Tower.

Night City Legend.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read all published 76 chapters (1800 pages).

It has been a struggle to find new cyberpunk stories to binge. It’s a small slice of our small genre, but dammit I’ve played through Cyberpunk2077 too many times to get much more out of yet another runthrough. System Override scratched the itch well. So well, I’ve read the almost 2k pages available in about three days. Sleep when you’re dead, choom.

Right, so the story follows the star from the cyberpunk Edgerunners anime, David Martinez. In this timeline, though, Biotechnica has been playing the fun human experimentation game again, and David the boy has unwillingly been given a nanobot injection. This develops into an AI core plus nanobots inside him, which eventually he brings under his control and paves the way for him to become a legend.

Character wise, a broad variety from the anime and the game are present. David, Maine, Dorio, Lucy, Pilar, Becca, Kiwi, Falco. All the fixers. V and Jackie. Pretty much everyone so far, except for Vik. Poor Vik. Their representation feels very true to media, and when plotlines diverge from the anime and game, they continue to feel like authentic characters instead of caricatures. Dialogue is a strong point, and conversation and banter flow fast and vicious.

Pacing is just as fast. David has ten million things to do, time for a reasonable person to do one, and he manages to do ten. There’s training. There’s coding, hacking, and netrunning. Learning the sword. Taking on gigs with Maine’s crew. Being a solo. Attending Arasaka Academy. Climbing the corpo ladder and all the socialising bullshit that comes with it. Touching base with his family across the border. Selling XBDs, making XBDs. Literally eating rebar, osmium, and acid.

Like most cyberpunk stories, our MC rapidly goes from complete gutter-trash street rat to an incredibly overpowered scav-hunting, bullet-slicing ninja. Not only does David have his overpowered AI assistance helping him rapid heal, rapid learn, hack, and maximise his cyberware from almost day one, the first thing he gets chipped in (willingly) is a Sandevistan with a maximum time dilation factor of a thousand. The highest-tier icon Sandy from the game is a 6.6x dilation. 1000x off the bad allows David to absolutely stomp any and every combat encounter in the entire series. It might have been nice to ramp up a bit slower, have more work go into the edge running and learning the ropes, but then again, maybe not. This is not a slow-burn series, this is power fantasy, and it’s a fun, fun, fun ride.

Honestly I sort of wish I slept on this one for a bit longer. The author has dared to take the 2025 Christmas and NYE period off to have a life, which means right as all hell is about to break loose in Night City, I’ve gotta sit on my lazy ass and stare into the void for a couple of weeks before I can get my next fix. Fuck.