Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review – freedom from the past

09/20/2023

GameCentral reviews the new paid-for story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, as the game finally exorcises the ghosts of its disastrous launch.

The cyberpunk genre is a fundamentally 1980s concept, that comes with that decade’s mores amplified to the extreme. That means hyper-capitalism, ultra-violence, use of the term ‘street cred’, laptops that are chunky even by today’s standards, and a knowing cynicism – which in Cyberpunk 2077 comes with a hefty dose of black humour.

Unfortunately, it also arrived with so many bugs you could barely see the game underneath, at least on consoles, but that’s a situation that’s been improving over the nearly three years’ worth of updates since it first launched. From this month, everyone who owns a copy of the game will be entitled to Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.0, which rebuilds a number of the game’s systems from scratch, enhancing a range of features and giving it a broader refresh across the board.

It also lays the groundwork for Phantom Liberty, the game’s first and only story expansion, which comes with large selection of its own novelties. The biggest of those is Dogtown itself, a completely new area of Night City to get lost in. It’s connected to Pacifica, home of the Voodoo Boys, one of the city’s more unsavoury gangs, whose influence on netrunning pops up quite a bit in the DLC.

In terms of architecture, Dogtown is less high-rise and a lot more post-apocalyptic than the rest of Night City, looking a like a sort of multi-coloured metropolitan Mad Max set. The sense of exploring somewhere different is enhanced by new cars, clothes, and weapons to discover, as you take on jobs from a familiar set of fixers, whose work extends to the rougher end of town.

Provided you have a save where you’ve completed the quest Transmission in the Automatic Love storyline, you can start Phantom Liberty straight away. If not, you can either work your way up to that point or restart the game with a level 20 V (the protagonist’s default name), issued to you so you can get straight to the new content without having to play multiple hours of the base game first.

The story starts in much the same way as John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York: the president’s space-plane is coming down in Dogtown and it’s your job to find her and get her out. That’s going to be complicated when the place is overrun with various flavours of goon, the most prominent of which belong to Colonel Kurt Hansen, Dogtown’s hardline dictatorial ruler.

It turns out the president’s no pencil pushing nerd, her greeting to V being to brutally beat them to the floor and shove a techno-shotgun in their face. It lets you know she’s a politician that isn’t going to be standing for any nonsense, even if she’ll still be needing V’s street smarts to stand a chance in Night City’s toughest district.

The president also has contacts of her own, one of whom you hear from right at the start. Songbird is the codename of her top tier netrunner, who gets V’s attention by making Johnny Silverhand, whose presence has been a constant throughout the game, vanish instantly with a simple snap of her fingers. Her promise is that if V will help her rescue the president from Hansen’s clutches, she’ll help V get her life back.

So begins Night City’s very own spy thriller, which right from the start doesn’t so much crank the action up to 11 as crank it up to 15. The first boss you face is a particularly hectic encounter, taking place in a confined space with an initially impossible-seeming volume of ordnance being directed at your flimsy human form.

You also swiftly find out that getting the president to safety was actually the easy bit. Extracting Songbird and saving your own life is a far knottier challenge and one that requires the support of the secret service, an appropriately crafty bunch whom you never quite know whether to trust or not. It’s a recurring theme, with a number of quests forcing you to decide who’s being honest and who’s trying to play you.

To assist with that you’ll have all 2.0’s toys and a completely new skill tree based on the Relic, the chip in V’s head that’s both keeping her alive and killing her in favour of reviving dead rocker, Johnny Silverhand – who’s slowly taking over her mind and body. The Relic’s skills aren’t upgraded by earning experience but by finding special Millitech terminals dotted around Dogtown, from which you can download Relic skill points.

The abilities you unlock are interesting rather than game changing, and certainly don’t make anything like as much difference as the rest of 2.0’s changes to perks and skills. The other very slightly damp squib is vehicle combat, which is mainly focused around jobs for familiar fixer El Capitan, who wants V to steal a selection of cars to order.

Getting those out of Dogtown means either beating a countdown timer or battling waves of attackers. Those engagements are okay for a while but lack the sophistication of Cyberpunk 2077’s more conventional gunplay, which also allows you to take cover, scale heights, and deploy a range of cyber quickhacks.

You do now have vehicle-targeting cyberware if you choose to unlock it in the perk tree, but it won’t work in all circumstances, making it an unreliable addition to your toolset. There are also still bugs, the game’s textures strobing unnervingly before it crashed to the PlayStation’s home screen on two occasions in our playthrough.

It’s a cracking story though, with a pivotal decision just after the halfway mark, that sends you on two quite different tacks. While you’ll still have the same fixer side missions available, the story bifurcates, giving a powerful motivation to try both branches.

The other thing likely to propel you to explore every possible mission is that some of the new endings for V and Johnny are pretty depressing, which is in line with Cyberpunk 2077’s world building but which may not feel all that satisfying based on the number of hours it takes to get there.

There are some truly memorable gigs and side missions, as well as a trip to the game’s spaceport (depending on which branch of the story you take), which has been the subject of feverish fan speculation ever since it was spotted in the distance. The voice acting is also first rate, and while Idris Elba’s agent Reed has an American accent that occasionally oscillates between different sides of the Atlantic, his presence remains utterly compelling.

There are lots of cameos from familiar faces, reflecting your choices and history in Cyberpunk 2077, and the final resolutions are just as sensitively handled, sometimes to heartbreaking effect. It’s a reminder that despite the grandeur and brutality of Night City, the real stars are CD Projekt’s characters, who are gritty, messy, and human to the core.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review summary

In Short: A taut, characterful headrush of an expansion that completes Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption and re-establishes it as one of the great open world adventures of the generation.

Pros: Dogtown looks fantastic, with its own highly distinctive characters and missions. Superb voice acting, Branching story that you’ll want to see in its entirety and good fan service cameos from old friends.

Cons: There are still plenty of bugs. Some of the refreshed systems are more useful than others and a number of the new endings are pretty depressing.

Score: 8/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Developer: CD Projekt
Publisher: CD Projekt Red
Release Date: 26th September 2023
Age Rating: 18

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