Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update turn Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it should have been at launch, spy thriller included.
Dogtown announces itself immediately. It's a walled-off district 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 completely differently from the rest of Cyberpunk 2077. Idris Elba's Solomon Reed, an NUSA federal agent with his own tangled history in Night City, anchors the expansion's story, and he's one of the best-written characters CD Projekt Red has put in this game.
None of it would land the same without the 2.0 update running underneath it, a total rework of the skill trees, cyberware slots, and perk system that shipped alongside the expansion. Builds actually feel distinct from each other now. A netrunner plays nothing like a solo built around cyberware melee, and both play nothing like a stealth-focused hacker sneaking past cameras instead of fighting through them. This is closer to the game CD Projekt Red described before launch back in 2020 than anything that actually shipped that year.
“This is closer to the game they promised in 2020 than anything that shipped that year.”
The police system got rebuilt too, and it needed it. Cops used to spawn directly behind you the second a crime flagged, which broke the fantasy of a functioning city immediately. Now there's an actual wanted system with escalating response tiers, real car chases, and enforcers who show up in vehicles instead of teleporting into frame. It's not going to win awards next to a dedicated open-world crime game, but it stopped being a running joke, which is most of what it needed to do.
The main expansion story runs six to eight hours depending on how much side content you chase, and it earns its length. The choice between siding with Reed or with Songbird, a black-market fixer with her own reasons for wanting out of Night City, changes the back half of the story and locks you into one of several distinct endings. It's the kind of branching CD Projekt Red talked about for the base game and mostly didn't deliver on.
Dogtown itself holds up as a setting even after the main story wraps. Kurt Hansen's gang politics give the district a reason to feel lived-in rather than decorative, and the verticality of the place, stacked shanty towers connected by walkways and elevators, makes it feel distinct from anywhere else in Night City despite being a fraction of the size.
It's not free of rough edges. You need to reach a specific point in the main story before Phantom Liberty even opens up, which locks newcomers out of the expansion's best material for several hours. Vehicle handling is better than it was but still not great even after the 2.0 pass, and I still ran into the occasional NPC frozen mid-animation, a reminder that this is still Cyberpunk 2077 under the new coat of paint.
It's hard to talk about Phantom Liberty without talking about where this game started. The 2020 launch was rough enough to get pulled from the PlayStation Store entirely, and three years of patches later, this expansion and the 2.0 update it rides in on are the clearest evidence yet that CD Projekt Red actually fixed it rather than just moving on.
If you played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch and bounced off it, 2.0 alone is worth coming back for. If you're coming in fresh, Phantom Liberty is close to essential, a genuinely great spy story built on top of a game that finally plays like it should have from day one.