Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update turn Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it should have been at launch, spy thriller included.
I bounced off Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 the way most people did, and I quit about nine hours in and left it alone for three years on the assumption it was a write-off. What got me back was a friend who kept sending screenshots of a district I didn't recognize. Dogtown is a walled-off part of Night City run by a warlord instead of a corporation, packed vertically with shanty towers and black-market clinics, and it drops V into a spy thriller that plays nothing like the rest of the game. Idris Elba's Solomon Reed, an NUSA federal agent with his own tangled history in the place, anchors the story and is the best-written character CD Projekt Red has put in this game, partly because Elba underplays him in a cast that mostly doesn't.
There's one mission I want to talk about without spoiling it, because it's the reason I'd hand anybody this expansion. It's called Somewhat Damaged, it lands late on the path I chose, and it takes away most of what makes V powerful before locking you in a bunker with one thing that hunts you through the dark. No wave combat and no quickhack spam, just vents and a sound you learn to dread inside about ninety seconds. It's the closest this series has come to survival horror, it lasts maybe forty minutes, and it's the best forty minutes CD Projekt Red has shipped in either of its big franchises. I looked at the pause menu for a while afterwards at one in the morning with my shoulders somewhere up around my ears.
“This is closer to the game they promised in 2020 than anything that shipped that year.”
The choice underneath the whole story, siding with Reed or with Songbird, the netrunner trying to get out from under the NUSA's leash, splits the back half into two different sequences of missions and locks you into one of several endings. I sided with Reed, and the ending I got is the bleakest thing CDPR has written. Most players seem to hate that ending, and I think it's the best one in the game, base game included, precisely because nobody in it gets talked out of being who they are.
None of it would land without the 2.0 update running underneath, the free rework of skill trees, cyberware and perks that shipped alongside the expansion. My netrunner played nothing like the katana-and-chrome build I swapped into halfway through, and both of them sit closer to the game CDPR described in 2020 than anything that shipped that year. The police got rebuilt as well, with escalating wanted tiers and car chases in place of cops teleporting in behind your shoulder, which stopped the whole system being a running joke.
Dogtown keeps working after the story wraps up. Kurt Hansen's gang politics make the district feel lived-in rather than decorative, and the stacked verticality, shanty towers strung together by walkways and elevators, reads like nowhere else in Night City despite covering a fraction of the area.
The rough edges here are all familiar ones from the base game. Phantom Liberty doesn't open up until a specific point in the main story, so a newcomer waits hours before any of this becomes available to them, which is a bad way to sell an expansion to the people most likely to be buying the game fresh. Vehicle handling still isn't right even after 2.0. I also found one NPC frozen mid-animation with his arm out, holding an invisible drink, which felt almost nostalgic.
Three years ago this game got pulled off the PlayStation Store, and last week I recommended it to a friend without attaching a single disclaimer to it, which I didn't notice I'd done until hours afterwards. I never worked out how much of 2.0 was always the plan and how much of it was salvage, because CDPR has been careful in interviews about which parts were cut for time in 2020 and which were rebuilt from nothing. The friend I recommended it to still hasn't started playing it, because he's waiting for a sale, which I definately understand and have chosen not to comment on.