Cyberpunk 2077 & Phantom Liberty Review

I’m not one to fangirl over celebrities, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t scream like a schoolgirl as the immortal Keanu Reeves took to the stage during the big reveal of Cyberpunk 2077 and off-the-cuff created another meme he’d likely never see as he so wisely avoids much of the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the internet. It was one of the few times I didn’t immediately recoil when a well-known Hollywood regular attached themselves to a game and given the pedigree of CD Projekt Red, it was hard to imagine this most epic of advertising campaigns coming back to bite them in the ass…right up until it did of course.

To say that Cyberpunk 2077’s original launch was a rocky one would be both an understatement and an insult to off-road enthusiasts everywhere. A clear combination of poor management decisions and underestimating the amount of work required to deliver on promises made, it was an unwanted sequel to Fallout 76’s AAA dumpster fire release just two years prior. It would lead to a series of blindingly yellow social media posts outlining an ever-changing series of roadmaps that would eventually result in the conclusion that Cyberpunk 2077 was never going to be what anyone, including CD Projekt Red, had hoped it would be. Reduced to a 2.0 release of the base game, and a single expansion in Phantom Liberty, a lot of people wonder if Cyberpunk 2077 is worth returning to or jumping into now that we’ve reached the theoretical end of the line for content releases. I can confidently say that it’s absolutely worth it.

When Cyberpunk first launched, I put about 20 or so hours into the game on my PC before putting it down for a myriad reasons, but chiefly while playable the state of the game both from a performance perspective but also many of its mechanics made enjoying the very clear highlights of writing and characters extremely difficult. The intrigue of this 2.0 release was then much about hopping back in to see if those hurdles had been removed or at least reduced to a more manageable degree. Paired with Phantom Liberty, it proved a promising possible redemption arc and one that I was eager to see in action. To put it to bed up front, the performance in Cyberpunk 2077 has dramatically improved, the bugs are few and far between, and essentially every system that needed overhauling or polishing has been addressed, leading to a nearly frictionless experience that not many modern games get right.

Before we get too far into this, I’ll assume that many of you might not have much knowledge of the game at all, and so for this review, I’ll try to avoid comparing and contrasting versions 1.0 and 2.0 too heavily and review 2.0 and Phantom Liberty as it exists today on their own. I pair 2.0 and Phantom Liberty because while you could just go for the base game, I can’t imagine playing Cyberpunk 2077 without including the expansion and I suspect the majority of people will buy them together.

You’re V, which is sort of like Madonna or Prince but with fewer letters and musical talent but probably about the same amount of plastic surgery. You’re either a Corpo, a Street kid, or a Nomad, the choice of which is of course yours and will alter your introduction to Night City. Ultimately, you’ll be thrust into the other side of the prologue in much the same way regardless of backstory, but you’ll have different dialogue options, starting outfit, and even exclusive side quests waiting for you throughout the game depending on what you choose. Generally speaking, Cyberpunk 2077 does a great job of putting a number of options in front of you throughout the game which will alter both individual quest lines and also the main quest itself – many options of which aren’t painfully obvious which makes the whole experience feel a lot more organic and less like a choose your own adventure novel you begged your parents for alongside the latest I Spy hardcover whenever the Scholastic Book Orders rolled through your elementary school.

Cyberpunk has a lot of great qualities but towards the top of that list, and thankfully so for an RPG, is its phenomenal writing. Precious little of the over 100 hours of content a playthrough can provide brings no less than top-notch narrative, character, and dialogue writing – the latter of which stands out particularly. V has a bit of a problem and not a lot of options to solve it. Tiptoeing through the spoiler minefield, you find your subconscious invaded by one Mr. Johnny Silverhand played by Keanu himself. While for some this may actually be a life buff, for V it’s a bit more dire and so the story you’ll be playing out is an intricate tapestry of intertwining narratives directly and indirectly related to V and Johnny’s attempt at psychological divorce. Johnny’s interplay with V and the world around them throughout the game is always so well done and serves its purpose both as a character development tool for Johnny as well as a covert narrator like some sort of dystopian Cyberpunk Dickens novel turned pantomime. You’ll find yourself agreeing with him one minute, loathing his stubborn ass the next, but I think most people will come to respect Johnny as the game progresses and it makes some of the more subtle character development of V hit that much harder.

Phantom Liberty sits comfortably in the mid-game, canonically speaking, and while you don’t have to do so I would suggest at least dabbling in it when you can as its story folds very neatly into the conclusion of the base game and itself has multiple endings awaiting you. I really enjoyed the Phantom Liberty content, and I would argue that the ending (at least the one I got) was more satisfying than the base game’s conclusion though that’s mostly due to how open-ended they’ve left things for the now-announced sequel.

Keanu’s Johnny isn’t the only character you’ll be spending a lot of time with and he’s also not alone in how great a character he is, either. I can scarcely say there’s a particularly weak character to be found anywhere in the game, Phantom Liberty included. There are one or two that I didn’t enjoy as much as the others but that’s more about preference than about quality especially compared to many games in the genre today. Romance (and a Cyberpunk appropriate level of sock-on-door if you catch my drift) is of course an option in Night City should you choose to pursue it, however some players may be a bit disappointed in the number of options you have as female V compared to her male counterpart. Sex in general bathes the streets of Night City like a broken motel showerhead, and while I appreciate the realities of the source material there are some billboard ads and TV spots in the game that arguably jump the shark in a way that takes away from what is otherwise fantastic world-building. I appreciate the subtext of addiction in its many forms as much as the next guy, but full spread eagle across a billboard while a woman recreates an operatic climax in a Milfguard TV commercial above the ramen shop stall is where I draw a very thin line ribbed for her pleasure.

Having played Starfield immediately before Cyberpunk 2077 it only served to highlight just how much of a difference not only great writing and characters make, but how valuable it is to find ways to inject the player into any given scene in a way that makes them feel more like a participant and less like a talking lawn ornament. Cyberpunk has a healthy mix of on-rails dialogue (meaning not being able to move about a scene or move the camera) and off-rail moments that allow you to feel like you have much more agency than you do in other games in the genre. Add to that the ability to often interrupt a character mid-sentence verbally (or…ballistically) and it further serves to underscore the various plots you’ll be taking part in and give life to what can often become a slog in other RPGs. It’s one of the many ways the moment-to-moment gameplay in Cyberpunk 2077 is a frictionless experience – a concept that permeates almost every mechanic in the game.

What exactly do I mean when I say a frictionless experience? It’s a combination of things, I suppose. Primarily I consider frictionless design in a game to be ways in which the game respects the time it takes to do various things and provide alternate means to accomplish them more quickly in recognition that sometimes you don’t always want to hardcore roleplay every action. It’s also about removing the gamified feel of moment-to-moment gameplay like the aforementioned dialogue system present in Cyberpunk. This concept means slightly different things in different genres, but to me, it’s often a sign that the developers played their game enough to know where these points are and took the time to implement solutions. It’s perhaps best described universally as the game never letting the game get in its own way.

Cyberpunk 2077 exemplifies this concept more than any RPG – especially open-world RPG – I’ve played in a long time, including Baldur’s Gate III. Want to get a ride to the quest objective with the NPC you’re rolling with? Feel free to do so, but if you change your mind mid-ride you can always just skip the rest instantly. Want to drive to your next destination instead of fast travel but don’t have one of your cars nearby? Just summon it with your phone and get to it immediately. Enjoy your current build but find a cool new weapon you’d rather specialize in? Go ahead and redistribute your skill points at will. Don’t like the sound of where a side quest is going once you start it? Odds are you’ll have a dialogue option to end it should you choose. Speaking of dialogue, if you’ve already seen some and want to skip through a cutscene you can fast-forward whenever you’d like. Quests also almost always come to you naturally either based upon where you are in the story, where you are physically in the city, or a combination of both which means your progression feels natural not only for the main quest but your side jobs as well. All of these in a vacuum may be common practice to varying degrees, but Cyberpunk does them all in such a way that you will almost never feel impeded in any way outside of combat challenge and results in a flow of gameplay and narrative few games in this genre come close to achieving.

Combat and your skill progression are arguably the most reworked aspects of 2.0 from the game’s release. Without getting into needless detail, the skill system has been streamlined and feels much better than before. This streamlining and fine-tuning extends to the gun rebalancing and general combat systems in which your progress now largely depends upon better equipment and unlocked skills instead of just experience points put into stats. There is also enemy level scaling now which, according to those playing on Very Hard, can become bothersome to a degree and while I can’t speak to those difficulty levels as I played on normal, I still prefer the current system versus the release system by far. Perhaps what feels best about Cyberpunk’s combat is that regardless of how you choose to tackle combat scenarios, all of the options work well and feel powerful. You are very unlikely to feel you made a bad choice investing in a certain skill tree, though like I mentioned before even if you did you can redistribute the points as you wish anyway. I’m a sucker for pistols, snipers, and some stealth which had me feeling particularly badass and I had a great time mixing it up with cyberware attacks as well.

While weapon strategy in Cyberpunk isn’t remarkably deep, its variety is broad, and there are standout variants in each of the weapon classes that spice it up. There is no shortage of amazing pistols, though Johnny’s own handgun is near the top if only for its ridiculous reload animation and melee ability. Snipers feel good despite eventually being outclassed by more than a few pistols, and other staples like assault rifles and shotguns are well-represented. Melee weapons also abound with…a splash of Saint’s Row thrown in if you know what I mean. Being able to spec into a literal cyberpunk samurai that can dash around like a rabid weaponized squirrel while deflecting bullets back with your blade doesn’t hurt its case, either. Or, you know, you could just fold your enemies like a lawn chair with gorilla arms, too.

Rippin’ heads and pretending to be an overzealous chiropractor while you cruise Night City’s streets wouldn’t be quite the same if Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t look and sound as good as it does. When it first released, and assuming you weren’t attempting to play it on a last-generation console, Cyberpunk was one of the best-looking games anyone had seen. A few years later and with more work done and even crazier top-end options with those that remortgaged the house they don’t own for a 4090, that remains true today. Even on my 2080ti which is getting long in the tooth for 4k gaming managed 60fps with mostly high settings and some DLSS keep it steady. I wasn’t running raytracing, of course, but honestly, once you get to roughly high settings normally, you need to almost be able to go all the way with it before most people would be able to appreciate the differences during real-time gameplay.

Night City looks good anytime, anywhere, but it aptly looks its best at night cruising the neon-soaked streets on your bike or walking through the various districts just for the hell of it. Obviously, Cyberpunk excels from a technical perspective, but the art direction is just as worthy of praise and really sells the tone of Night City.  The amount of clutter throughout isn’t overdone despite being everywhere and goes a long way in making things feel as grimy and lived in as they should. NPC density and variety have improved and while they’re not technically smart NPCs the many ways in which they interact with the city around them do more than enough to sell the illusion. Animations and motion capture are all top-shelf stuff when it comes to important story interactions, and even outside of that, it doesn’t drop off much. The cast of characters look fantastic, especially in the skin tones and facial expressions, and combined with voice work that’s often just as good as the new pinnacle in Baldur’s Gate III and it’s easy to get completely immersed in everything Night City has to offer.

Ambient audio design is also a standout as you move from location to location with an orchestra of chatter from NPCs, traffic noise, advertisements blasting from every corner, and more. Guns sound satisfying, too, so when you do get pulled away from sightseeing or being an amateur photographer to dispatch some pesky distractions, your ears will at least enjoy themselves as you do. Bringing the entire presentation together, and yet another highlight of Cyberpunk 2077 – especially Phantom Liberty – is the music which was clearly very important to the team. Many of the high points in the story are brought to a fever pitch with a hard-hitting soundtrack that gets your blood pumping when it needs to and brings you back to earth when it suits the story. Phantom Liberty has some tracks during combat segments that really evoke John Wick, which if you’ve seen any of the films, you’d have a good idea of what I’m getting at, here.

I don’t doubt that CD Projekt Red learned a lot of lessons with Cyberpunk 2077’s original launch. The whole ordeal likely brought them close to financial ruin, but they clearly believed in their vision for the game and were willing to bet on it long-term with some love and care. It’s obviously ideal when a game releases in a finished state and doesn’t require years of work post-launch to achieve its vision but for Cyberpunk 2077 that’s not how the chips fell. Not every game gets an opportunity for a redemption arc either, and personally, I’m glad that Cyberpunk was one of the exceptions. There are few games in this generation that can match its writing, its characters, its one-two punch of bleeding edge visuals and stellar art direction, and audio presentation. It’s a game that pulls you in, gets you hooked, and keeps you immersed from start to finish. Whether this will be your first time playing, or you’re a returning player, Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and Phantom Liberty represent a complete RPG package you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.