Weapon inspect in Cyberpunk 2077
Night City's guns get more animation work than the shooting really calls for, and most players never see it. The first-equip sequence plays once, in the middle of a fight, while you are being shot at. The 2.0 update made that sequence repeatable on demand, and that is what people mean when they talk about inspecting a weapon here. If you only want the button, it is onhow to weapon inspect in Cyberpunk 2077. This page is about what you are looking at once it plays.
Three families, three sets of manners
Power weapons are the conventional ones: cased ammunition, a locked breech, ricochet as their party trick. Their animations are the ones that read as real, because they are modelled on real cycles. A slide runs to the rear and slams home, a cylinder swings out and locks back in, a pump gun's forend travels its full stroke.
Tech weapons charge before they fire, and the animation sells that with a rail spinning up or a coil glowing. Smart weapons are the ones worth watching twice: the barrel assembly splits and tracks, which has no real-world analogue at all and is the most obviously science-fiction thing in the game's arsenal.
The ones worth the two seconds
- Iconic handguns. The unique pistols carry bespoke animations rather than the generic one for their class, and the revolvers in particular get a long, deliberate cylinder check.
- Anything with a visible action. Lever guns, pump shotguns and revolvers show their whole mechanism. Closed-receiver rifles have far less to show.
- Heavily modded weapons. Scopes, muzzle devices and skins all render in the animation, so it doubles as the only proper look you get at a build you have spent money on.
Photo mode does it better
If you want to actually study a model rather than watch it move, photo mode is the better tool. It pauses everything, lets you orbit the camera and move in close, and holds the weapon still for as long as you want. The inspect animation is for motion; photo mode is for detail.
Stats are somewhere else entirely
None of this shows numbers. Damage, fire rate, attachment slots and mod slots live in the backpack: open the inventory and highlight the weapon to see the full card and compare it against what you have equipped. A lot of searches for weapon inspect are really searches for that screen.
The mechanisms are borrowed from real guns
The reason the power weapons animate convincingly is that the designers did not invent the cycles. A tilting-barrel locked breech behaves the same way in 2077 as it does on a service pistol today, and a double-action revolver's lockwork has not changed in a century. If the animation is what brought you here, the working versions are below.
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