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GameCentral reviews the new paid-for story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, as the game finally exorcises the ghosts of its disastrous launch.<\/p>\n
The cyberpunk genre is a fundamentally 1980s concept, that comes with that decade\u2019s mores amplified to the extreme. That means hyper-capitalism, ultra-violence, use of the term \u2018street cred\u2019, laptops that are chunky even by today\u2019s standards, and a knowing cynicism \u2013 which in Cyberpunk 2077 comes with a hefty dose of black humour.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, it also arrived with so many bugs you could barely see the game underneath, at least on consoles, but that\u2019s a situation that\u2019s been improving over the nearly three years\u2019 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\u2019s systems from scratch, enhancing a range of features and giving it a broader refresh across the board.<\/p>\n
It also lays the groundwork for Phantom Liberty, the game\u2019s 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\u2019s connected to Pacifica, home of the Voodoo Boys, one of the city\u2019s more unsavoury gangs, whose influence on netrunning pops up quite a bit in the DLC.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Provided you have a save where you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The story starts in much the same way as John Carpenter\u2019s classic Escape From New York: the president\u2019s space-plane is coming down in Dogtown and it\u2019s your job to find her and get her out. That\u2019s 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\u2019s hardline dictatorial ruler.<\/p>\n
It turns out the president\u2019s 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\u2019s a politician that isn\u2019t going to be standing for any nonsense, even if she\u2019ll still be needing V\u2019s street smarts to stand a chance in Night City\u2019s toughest district.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s clutches, she\u2019ll help V get her life back.<\/p>\n
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So begins Night City\u2019s very own spy thriller, which right from the start doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a recurring theme, with a number of quests forcing you to decide who\u2019s being honest and who\u2019s trying to play you.<\/p>\n
To assist with that you\u2019ll have all 2.0\u2019s toys and a completely new skill tree based on the Relic, the chip in V\u2019s head that\u2019s both keeping her alive and killing her in favour of reviving dead rocker, Johnny Silverhand \u2013 who\u2019s slowly taking over her mind and body. The Relic\u2019s skills aren\u2019t upgraded by earning experience but by finding special Millitech terminals dotted around Dogtown, from which you can download Relic skill points.<\/p>\n
The abilities you unlock are interesting rather than game changing, and certainly don\u2019t make anything like as much difference as the rest of 2.0\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s more conventional gunplay, which also allows you to take cover, scale heights, and deploy a range of cyber quickhacks.<\/p>\n
You do now have vehicle-targeting cyberware if you choose to unlock it in the perk tree, but it won\u2019t work in all circumstances, making it an unreliable addition to your toolset. There are also still bugs, the game\u2019s textures strobing unnervingly before it crashed to the PlayStation\u2019s home screen on two occasions in our playthrough.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s a cracking story though, with a pivotal decision just after the halfway mark, that sends you on two quite different tacks. While you\u2019ll still have the same fixer side missions available, the story bifurcates, giving a powerful motivation to try both branches.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s world building but which may not feel all that satisfying based on the number of hours it takes to get there.<\/p>\n
There are some truly memorable gigs and side missions, as well as a trip to the game\u2019s 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\u2019s agent Reed has an American accent that occasionally oscillates between different sides of the Atlantic, his presence remains utterly compelling.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s a reminder that despite the grandeur and brutality of Night City, the real stars are CD Projekt\u2019s characters, who are gritty, messy, and human to the core.<\/p>\n
In Short:<\/strong> A taut, characterful headrush of an expansion that completes Cyberpunk 2077\u2019s redemption and re-establishes it as one of the great open world adventures of the generation.<\/p>\n Pros: <\/strong>Dogtown looks fantastic, with its own highly distinctive characters and missions. Superb voice acting, Branching story that you\u2019ll want to see in its entirety and good fan service cameos from old friends.<\/p>\n Cons: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n Score:<\/strong> 8\/10<\/p>\n Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X\/S, and PC
Price: \u00a324.99
Developer: CD Projekt
Publisher: CD Projekt Red
Release Date: 26th September 2023
Age Rating: 18<\/em><\/p>\n