Phantom Liberty review: Cyberpunk 2077 has never been so good

Around three years after its release, the cool role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 has finally recovered from its disastrous launch. CD Projekt Red has been working diligently on the game ever since. After numerous bug fixes and updates, the Polish studio promises the biggest innovations the game has seen thus far with Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty.

The former is a free update that all players of Cyberpunk 2077 will receive. It includes fundamental changes to the skill system, vehicle combat and a completely revised police system. Meanwhile, paid story expansion Phantom Liberty builds on these foundations and takes me on an action-packed spy thriller full of intrigue and twists in the new Dogtown district. Let me say first of all, Cyberpunk 2077 has never been this fun.

A brilliant start

At the start of Phantom Liberty, I have the option to set out on the adventure as a new character or continue playing with my existing one. I opt for the latter. The expansion’s story is set before the end of the main quest in the base game. So my character V still has an experimental technology – the Relic – that’s slowly killing them.

Phantom Liberty gets off to an explosive start. I’d go as far as to say I haven’t had such a great introduction to a game in a long time. I’m lured into Dogtown, a heavily guarded district of Night City, by a mysterious lady called Songbird. She claims she can free me from the implant and save my life. In return, I’m to rescue the President of the New United States of America – NUSA for short – from a plane that’s crashed in Dogtown. Sounds easy, no?

In the brilliant opening sequence, I don’t just see a plane crash. I also sneak around and shoot my way through hordes of bloodthirsty mercenaries who have it in for the president. Afterwards, I join forces with the president to fight against a huge robot monster. So much happens in such a short space of time. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.

Even after this breakneck action, the narrative pace doesn’t let up. I quickly get to know ex-agent Solomon Reed, played by the excellent Idris Elba. He’s meant to extract the president from Dogtown and track down my contact Songbird. Meanwhile, amid all the commotion, the mysterious woman has vanished into thin air. The former spy’s involvement ends up landing me in a web of intrigue and betrayal. One twist follows the next. I sometimes feel like I’m in a James Bond film. This is what a new game should feel like. Hats off to CD Projekt Red.

Agonising choice at the start of the game

The ingenious start of the game means I don’t have time to worry about the new skill trees at first. There’s so much to do.

With my level 30 character, I’ve already managed to unlock lots of skills in the base game. These will be reset with Update 2.0. The reason being that unlockable perks have been completely overhauled. I need to rethink how I want to create my character in Phantom Liberty. If you play with a new character, you start at level 20 and can also reinvest your skill points.

I didn’t think the perks in the old skill system were particularly exciting. A lot of the skills only gave you incremental improvements, such as a few percentage points more in attack or a few less seconds with hacks. Boring.

The skills in the new trees, on the other hand, look much more exciting, even at first glance. I scroll through the menus and discover many perks that pique my interest. You’re saying I can throw enemies around like a mad hulk? Yes, please. I can slow down time while driving? I want that too. I can deflect gunfire with a katana just like a Jedi Knight? Shut up and take my perk points.

However, the large array of choice can also be paralysing. I usually unlock skill points bit by bit in a big RPG like this. But now I have to give it everything in one go. That stresses me out at first. After a lot of back and forth, I finally decide on a Netrunner build. I invest the most attribute points in Intelligence and unlock as many perks there as possible. This is roughly equivalent to the Hack and Slash build that CD Projekt Red presented before the launch:

I’m pleased with the result. Before I go into a fight and start shooting, I annoy opponents with hacks. The new perks even enable me to stack up to four hacks on a single opponent. This is an incredibly powerful skill. Most of the time I cripple an enemy, upload a virus that also attacks surrounding enemies and finish by inflicting damage with burns. Or I simply detonate their grenade. Boom. If I don’t have enough RAM points for the hacks, I activate Overclock mode. This lets me briefly use life points instead of RAM. Now no one can stop the kamikaze super hacker Domi!

I end up having much more fun with this Netrunner build in 20 or so hours of play than with the boring perks from the main game. And this is just one of many builds available with the new update. The new skill system is a real game changer.

New skills are just the beginning

As well as the revised skill system, Update 2.0 includes other major and minor changes that significantly affect the flow of the game. Most notably, the overhauled police AI. This was very disappointing in the base game. Cops often behaved unnaturally and illogically during car chases. They also appeared from nowhere, as if they’d been beamed in straight from police headquarters. This stupid behaviour is a thing of the past. Police officers are now smarter, more persistent and more easily irritated than before the update. The pseudo-police in Dogtown – bloodthirsty Barghest mercenaries – are even a bit nastier and easier to provoke.

I’d like to highlight two more minor innovations I particularly enjoyed. Sprinting now doesn’t use up Stamina points. These are only tapped into for shooting and swerving. A great improvement, as limited sprinting was bugging me recently in Starfield. What’s more, medication is no longer a consumable item. Instead, it’s a permanently equipped item that automatically recharges over time. This puts an end to going into a fight with 100 med packs and keeping myself alive by constantly taking drugs. It forces me to think more strategically and use my skills – especially the risky Overclock mode – in a more targeted way.

What’s completely new is vehicle battles. With Update 2.0, you can pull out your gun in a car and shoot at enemies – similar to drive-by shootings in GTA. In Phantom Liberty, this innovation has another dimension thanks to additional perks. You can now unlock a skill that lets you control cars remotely or even make them explode. This is incredibly fun, both in chases and normal fights – and it looks pretty damn cool.

Dogtown is cooler than Night City

The highlights of Phantom Liberty are the main missions I complete in Dogtown. They’re grandiose staged showpieces for the new unlockable skills, which give me a lot of flexibility in terms of strategy. The quests may seem a bit disjointed in terms of content at first, but the more I learn about the intrigue behind the missions, the clearer the overall picture becomes. And the missions themselves are exceptional. I feel like a secret agent, for instance when infiltrating a party to get sensitive information. What’s more, the characters I meet throughout the story are superbly written and showcased by an excellent cast.

But there’s also a lot to discover in Dogtown aside from the main story. The district is its own little microcosm that functions beyond the laws of Night City. Dogtown is seedy, dirty and full of shady characters, with Kurt Hansen in charge. He’s a ruthless arms dealer who commands the bloodthirsty Barghest pseudo-police. There are numerous side missions to complete in his realm. These range from funny stories with typically dark Cyberpunk humour to unexpectedly tragic quests and exciting characters.

Yes, even outside of the side missions, there are characters I fell in love with immediately. Such as a small, cheeky chap who sells me deadly hacks and weapons in the Dogtown market. As a side note, he keeps insulting me savagely. What a cute little nasty piece of work. I can’t wait to come back.

Dogtown is surprisingly small; I’d have expected a much larger map. It takes up about 10% of Night City. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though, because the open-world design of the Cyberpunk universe isn’t designed for exploring anyway. It doesn’t awaken a desire for discovery in me in the same way Tears of the Kingdom did this year, for instance. And that’s OK. The game has other strengths. The open world exists so I can immerse myself in the dystopian atmosphere of the game. It gives the missions context and proves to be an exciting playing arena. In Dogtown, the density of exciting locations and missions is much higher than in the huge Night City. I get to the action much faster and have more fun as a result. Not everything has to be bigger and more spectacular all the time.

Phantom Liberty is breathtakingly beautiful – and a bit buggy

Graphically, Phantom Liberty cuts an incredibly fine figure. Even if it sounds hackneyed, the game is breathtakingly beautiful and regularly makes my jaw drop. As well as the incredibly detailed characters, what particularly fascinated me was Dogtown’s architecture. The district is small but densely populated and more vertically designed. No matter where you look, the game is bursting with impressive nuances.

I tested the game on the PS5 and Phil checked out the PC version. Phantom Liberty is in a completely different league on his rig with a 4090 card compared to the PS5 version. On PC, the game is characterised by atmospheric lighting and realistic reflections. This is mainly due to the extensive ray tracing settings and the use of DLSS 3.5 (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/dlss-3-5-cyberpunk-2077-september-21-launch). Below you can see a few impressions from Dogtown that compare the PS5 (left) and PC (right) versions. The difference in graphics isn’t the same across all situations.

A small consolation for console gamers is that the game at least runs at a fairly stable 60 fps on the PS5 in performance mode. Don’t even bother with ray tracing. Its 30 fps feel extremely sluggish and you need a magnifying glass to spot any visual differences in performance mode.

Despite all the praise for its technical implementation, I still encountered a few bugs on my adventure. Aside from visual glitches, the game crashed four times in roughly 20 hours of play. The most bizarre was during the credits after the final mission. So, Phantom Liberty isn’t completely bug-free, but it’s in a much better state at launch than Cyberpunk 2077 was three years ago.

A bumpy landing

As brilliantly as Phantom Liberty takes off, its landing doesn’t pack the same punch. I was particularly disappointed by the last mission, which left me feeling meh. To cap it all off, it also requires a hell of a long time. The final quest takes everything that made Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty so fun and throws it in the bin. I’m forced to participate in a never-ending scavenger hunt, repeating repetitive tasks over and over. Along the way, I’m stalked by an invincible opponent who can finish me off with a single punch. This is annoying, imposed trial-and-error gameplay, and it has no place in such a great DLC. Even the epilogue after the mission is unnecessarily drawn out, at least in the ending I experienced. The game doesn’t end with a bang, but instead slowly burns out. It’s a shame.

In hindsight, I’m also disappointed with the new baddie. Kurt Hansen is… boring. There’s no surprise, no twist to make him interesting. When it comes down to it, he’s just an evil villain. I’d have expected more from a spy thriller.

Verdict: Phantom Liberty is the ultimate Cyberpunk experience

Phantom Liberty takes everything that Cyberpunk 2077 did well and packages it into a compact gaming experience that goes full-throttle right from the start. The changes to the skill system and police AI as well as vehicle combat are real game changers and have far-reaching effects on the flow of the game.

The spy story is thrillingly told and boasts an excellent cast. Notably, Idris Elba as Solomon Reed delivers an excellent performance. The somewhat bumpy ending and the one-dimensional main villain leave a bland aftertaste. But it’s not enough to tarnish my very good overall impression in the long run. Phantom Liberty represents CD Projekt Red at its best. Cyberpunk has never been so fun.

*Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is available for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC from 26 September. Depending on the platform, this expansion costs between 32 and 35 francs or euros. Thanks to CD Projekt Red for providing the game for me to review.