Phantom Liberty is the perfect excuse to revisit a truly reborn Cyberpunk 2077

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SHOULD I PLAY CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY?

Yes, you should play Phantom Liberty, but now is a great time to return to Cyberpunk 2077 itself and experience it as it was originally intended. Cyberpunk 2077 has a messy history of unimaginable hype, crushing disappointment, incremental updates, and now, finally, its first and only DLC, Phantom Liberty. The expansion is a thrilling addition to Cyberpunk 2077 that pulls from cult classics like Escape from New York, but it only works at all because it arrives alongside Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update, which finally stabilizes and improves the core game to the point that it’s ready for its moment in the spotlight.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about six hours of the 2.0 build of Cyberpunk 2077, including the opening hour or so of Phantom Liberty. I spent most of that time reacquainting myself with Night City and poking around in some of the new 2.0 additions, such as the completely overhauled skill system. The new questline for Phantom Liberty popped up right away, and so eventually I headed over to find my contact, Songbird, at the entrance to a new area called Dogtown. This new district is dominated by a huge ruined sports stadium, and it’s an area where neither the NCPD nor the corps have any control—in many ways, it’s the dystopian near-future vision of Manhattan as a prison island in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY?

• An over-the-top story that starts with a bang. Phantom Liberty didn’t waste any time getting going once I arrived at the entrance to Dogtown. As I stealthily crept past the guards and through a side entrance that led through a canyon-sized parking garage, I was guided by a new companion in my skull: Songbird, a netrunner who works for the president, needed my help because the president’s plane had been hijacked. And it was about to crash. In Dogtown. With Songbird on board. It’s an action-packed introduction to an exciting new area to explore, and while I was on my way to the rooftops to watch the plane make its crashed landing, I stopped to shop for new weapons and clothes, snuck past guards, and got into some thrilling firefights in the crumbling husk of the football stadium that marks the entrance to Dogtown.

• Dogtown is a dangerous, thrilling place. I haven’t explored a lot of Dogtown yet, but the time I’ve spent there so far has been a thrill ride. It’s a much more lawless place than the rest of Night City, if you can believe that— NCPD is effectively banned, so it’s patrolled by violent armed goons employed by Colonel Kurt Hansen, the strongman who runs the area. Hansen showed up on TV screens as I explored, spouting his extremist libertarian vision for the area (“Taxes? Who needs ’em?”), all while his armored soldiers menaced everyone around and cars smoldered in the streets. His political beliefs shape this new area in subtle ways too: Shops sell a wider variety of advanced weapons, and the residents sport more (a lot more) visible cyberware on their bodies.

• New character progression options. Cyberpunk 2077’s new update overhauls the existing character progression system, but Phantom Liberty adds a whole new skill tree, with its own mechanics for leveling up. This Relic branch allowed me to pick cool new abilities for V, like visually highlighting weak points on enemies or enhancing optical camouflage.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY?

• This is it. It was hard for me to shake the sad feeling that Phantom Liberty marks the end for new Cyberpunk 2077 stories just as the game has finally found its legs and can be enjoyed the way it was meant to be. We won’t be seeing any further expansions for the game, which has spent its entire life in game development intensive care. It felt like a swan song that came on just as things had come into focus and gotten good—and that’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it?

• Johnny Silverhand gets sidelined, and it’s a bit corny. Minor spoilers here, but as Phantom Liberty opens, Songbird kind of shoves Johnny Silverhand aside to take his place as your spectral companion for this specific adventure. It’s a necessary move to explain why Johnny’s not talking to you for a bit (and they couldn’t just say, “We didn’t want to hire Keanu Reeves again, he’s expensive”), but I felt it was handled a bit clumsily. Seeing the two spectral entities interact with each other was neat, but it was also jarringly obvious that it’s a bit of production-related stage shuffling.

• Your PC is gonna hate you. Cyberpunk 2077 runs so much better now than it did when it launched that it feels like a completely different game, but Phantom Liberty is still going to push your rig to the limits if you let it. I messed around a little bit with the new Overdrive graphics mode when it was introduced back in April, and was pleasantly surprised by my benchmark results. Phantom Liberty is going to want all the resources your PC can give it, even with all the improvements made in Update 2.0. Just be ready to adjust some graphics options down a bit.

💬 Are you ready to dive back into Night City for a new adventure in Cyberpunk 2077, or is Phantom Liberty too little too late for you? Let me know what you think in the comments.