Playing Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2021, at least for me, was a bit of a surreal experience.
Here was a game by the same studio that’d just set the world alight with The Witcher 3, putting out something that, even once the litany of teething issues and bugs that turned its initial release upside down were gone, often just didn’t feel like it had the same magic.
Sure, there were moments when everything clicked together and it could blow you away, usually by executing the intimacy and subtle joy of an encounter like scuba-diving through Judy Alvarez’s drowned hometown in a manner that could truly draw you in. These moments however, mostly felt like droplets of brilliance in a sea of things that didn’t quite come off as well as they could have, either storytelling-wise or from a technical perspective.
Throughout three playthroughs, I tried to love Cyberpunk as much as its pre-release hype had led me to believe I would. Sometimes I did.
Returning to it once more in 2023 to see what the Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 update had to offer, as many others no doubt will in the coming months, I’ve now tried again. This time, I think I’ve gotten as close as I’m ever going to get to succeeding.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
By far the greatest strength of Phantom Liberty is its characters, who bring the expansion’s decently long and choice-filled main story to life. Going in, I was unsure whether an adventure that sees V head into a heavily militarised setting in a bid to score a cure for their fatal and unfortunate relic problem by saving the NUSA President would prove to be the best choice for the game’s sole expansion.
After all, a lot of that magic I loved in the base game revolved around side quests due their ability to fully embrace the simple and human, rather than being bound by the need to explain the bunch of complex lore behind the factions and history of Night City.
However, I’m delighted to report that, despite some sequences that feel like they’ve been ripped straight out of Call of Duty or the pages of a Tom Clancy book, for all of the good and bad that entails, there are even more moments when you’ll see Phantom Liberty’s cast given the time and attention needed to develop and properly unravel themselves to you. Songbird, the netrunner whom the DLC’s tale comes to revolve around, is very well-written, both from a dialogue and motivation perspective.
She comes across pretty perfectly as equal parts Machiavellian string-puller and beaten-down, desperate figure just trying to survive in a brutal world that keeps trying to bury her alive. I’d go so far as to say she’s probably gone straight onto my favourite game characters of all time list.
Due to the fact that he’s portrayed by Idris Elba, I’d feared that Solomon Reed would end up feeling a lot like Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand did to me in the base game. However, instead of being an overwhelming presence that you can easily end up hating because of the fact that he pops up so often you feel as though you have to find him charming and likeable, Reed ends up augmenting the experience simply by being another very good part of it.
Sure, he has the benefit of not living inside the player’s head, which was a large factor in how much I came to tire of Silverhand’s schtick, and is a role that fits Elba’s strengths to a T, but the fact that he’s sometimes allowed to retreat into the background a little bit is something that benefits the entire narrative.
Speaking of Silverhand, he’s still there in Phantom Liberty, sometimes appearing for an occasionally inane chat that’ll inevitably feature the word ‘choom’ or ‘gonk’ at some juncture during moments that’d be better suited to house a reflective silence to let what’s just happened or been said sink in. But, it does feel like efforts have been made to tone his presence down and give you more of a chance to disagree with him if you wish, which I appreciate.
Along with Songbird and Reed, Alex, the latter’s FIA sleeper agent partner in crime, is another standout, with a memorable optional scene at a bar really helping with her depth. You even get some nuance with NUSA President Rosalind Myers and Dogtown’s militaristic overlord Kurt Hansen, as well as plenty of charming little side characters.
C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate
Hansen’s demesne makes for a pretty good DLC setting, even if having an entire new district of Night City suddenly pop up on your map overnight is arguably a tad immersion-breaking. Boasting plenty of interesting locations and unique architecture, from the neon-trimmed pyramid of the Heavy Hearts club, to the bustling market of the stadium, filled with ware hawkers and statues of futuristic American football players, the addition of Dogtown next door essentially helps Pacifica finally fulfil its full potential.
A perfect symbol of this is what Phantom Liberty does for mysterious fixer Mr. Hands, finally giving him a chance to step out of the shadows and become a fully formed character, a treatment that I’d have honestly liked to have seen a couple more of his compatriots from the base game receive.
Hands serves as the main distributor of Phantom Liberty’s gigs and side quests, the majority of which are well fleshed out and serve as much more than just generic things to do while you wait to be dragged back into the main story. There some really memorable dungeons and encounters peppered throughout the former, ensuring they don’t just feel like faceless money and skill grinding opportunities.
The latter, to me, were a little bit more hit and miss. I really enjoyed one that gives you a chance (via the medium of casually accepting drugs from a stranger, which I’m not endorsing here) to get more of a sense of what it’s like to be a member of the Barghest, Hansen’s army of ex-military goons, who serve as his district’s vigilante protectors.
I wasn’t particularly a fan of a mission that saw a braindance salesman take on the mannerisms of a pornstar following an accident, leading to Silverhand actively chastising you for even entertaining the option you’re given to have them star in a faux-porno shoot. That said, depending on how you felt about the tone adopted by some of the sections of the base game that dealt with the grotty underbelly of Night City, you might find nothing wrong with it.
More human than human
Speaking of the old Cyberpunk, Phantom Liberty’s release has been timed up to occur alongside the deployment of the game’s massive and highly-publicised 2.0 update, which aims to revamp a number of its base mechanics. The most noticeable of these revisions are those made to cyberware, especially the decision to have your character’s armour rating be tied to their enhancements, rather than their clothing, as was previously the case.
As well as giving you much more freedom over your character’s look, instead of shackling you to wearing whichever threads offer the best protection, this big change gives you much more of a practical reason to invest in body mods (I imagine I wasn’t the only one to have some mantis blades installed because they looked cool and never really end up using them.)
In addition to mods like subdermal armour that do exactly what they say on the tin, the update also adds a bunch of powerful new cyberware that gives you something to blow your beefy endgame wallet on. I ended up investing in a second heart and some tech that healed me every time I notched a kill. Thankfully, despite the first of those being able to literally bring me back from the dead if my health hit zero outside of its cooldown window, having both didn’t make my character feel too overpowered in comparison to Phantom Liberty’s array of enemies.
As part of the update’s revamp of the game’s perk trees, there are more cyberware-themed perks on offer, including the Edgerunner perk, which allows you exceed the cyberware capacity limit CDPR has instituted to stop everyone from immediately installing enough chrome to set off airport metal detectors from 500 miles away.
Unfortunately, the perk has been implemented as one of the rewards for maxing out the Technical Ability perk tree, meaning that unless you allocate your character’s points into getting that ability up to 20, you won’t be able to take it. This wouldn’t be an issue if you could re-allocate your existing character’s ability points upon firing up 2.0 for the first time, as you do with your perk points, but as is, it feels like Edgerunner might possibly have been better implemented outside of an ability perk tree. Perhaps tying it to hitting a certain level or adding it to the new Relic skill tree would have retained its exclusivity, while giving more players a chance to try it out.
The perks I did take made my stealth and guns-focused build feel a bit more effective than it had been in the base game, but the shift wasn’t too dramatic. There are some designed to augment vehicle combat, which is another of the update’s big additions and works pretty well, even if Cyberpunk’s cars don’t quite handle well enough to facilitate lengthy GTA-style chases. Given that Phantom Liberty takes place in a district that Night City’s cops are barred from entering, I didn’t get much of a chance to test out the new wanted system, but from what I did experience, it seemed escapable enough at low ratings and tough enough to evade if you’d been really naughty.
It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?
Playing Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion in 2023 was, by-and-large, a wonderful experience. It genuinely feels like CDPR has managed to zero-in on a lot of what the base game did best, as well as finding ways to polish up some of the aspects that didn’t quite live up to their potential.
That said, I can’t help feeling a little bit sad that Phantom Liberty is set to be the game’s sole expansion. Given the volume of changes it brings to the whole Cyberpunk experience, it feels like it’d have made an ideal facsimile of The Witcher 3’s brilliant Hearts of Stone DLC, before a second expansion properly knocked things out of the park in a similar fashion to Blood and Wine.
A bit like Roy Batty in that film it clearly draws a lot of inspiration from, I’m left a bit unsure whether Cyberpunk would have been better off being given a just a little more time to change the impression it’ll leave behind, or if this is the right point at which its story should end.
Regardless, at least Phantom Liberty will leave players with a bunch of memorable moments that’ll live on in their minds, rather than being lost in time.
Reviewed on PC. A code was provided by the publisher.