Now Playing: Phantom Liberty (DLC)

Phantom Liberty is the first and likely the last expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. It introduces a new area of Night City to explore – Dogtown – in the previously content sparse district of Pacifica. This new area is a fantastic addition, feeling very much like a city within a city. Geographically, the area is actually rather small, but it’s incredibly layered and dense with more verticality and open buildings than in any other area of Night City. There’s a lot to see, discover and explore with the addition of new side quests and gigs.

Although there’s not an abundance of new side content, what’s here is all of excellent quality and the gigs offer far more elaborate missions than those in the base game, with more character interactions and more choices on how they can be resolved. There’s also new ‘radiant’ style content in the form of airdrops and vehicle contracts.

But the heart of Phantom Liberty is a new main quest – a spy thriller involving secret agents, a missing President and a possible new way to save V from the Relic. I’d estimate it takes about 10 hours to complete, although that will depend upon your chosen difficulty and style of play. This new quest integrates into the base game during Act 2 and I’d say it integrates quite well – but certainly not perfectly.

I say ‘not perfectly’ because once you begin PL you’re essentially locked out of all other content for the next few hours, and even once you can travel freely between Dogtown and the rest of Night City, the nature of the quest line and how it’s entirely centred within Dogtown means you’ll likely want to keep everything else on hold until you’ve completed it.

It does result in a kind of separation between the PL content and the rest of the game. There are attempts to connect it through a few quest specific dialogue options related to base game content you may or may not have completed but on the whole, PL does feel pretty disconnected from everything else that’s going on – and even more so if you don’t unlock the new base game ending option.

Overall though, I thought the main quest in PL was pretty damn fantastic. It has its slow moments, but there’s a nice variety of quests, new mechanics, new locations and new characters to love and hate. And if there is one aspect of the base game that is perfectly incorporated into PL, it’s your interactions with Johnny Silverhand which add some welcome new dimensions to your evolving relationship.

Although there is an option to skip straight to Phantom Liberty, I chose to begin a fresh save from the very beginning of 2077 in order to experience the new 2.0 update. And this review is as much about 2.0 as it is PL because of how extensively it alters the base and expansion experience.

First of all – the visuals. With the new path tracing option, 2077 is easily one of the best looking games I’ve ever played. And thanks to the new DLSS 3.5 option, I can run the game at a minimum of 90 FPS at 1440p even in the busiest sections. The only downside to 3.5 right now is the very noticeable ‘ghosting’ effect on character faces at a distance, but I’m sure that’s something that will improve over time, just as it did with earlier DLSS releases.

The game now structures and unlocks its side content and gigs in a fashion that’s much better paced alongside the main content. What 2.0 does best though is revamp the attributes, skills and cyberware systems. I didn’t think these were bad prior to 2.0, but this update makes everything feel far more cohesive. Attributes are now more clearly defined in terms of what kind of play style you want to build. Cyberware is now more of a balancing act that also links more directly to the skills you’ve chosen and the abilities you’ve unlocked.

Previously, the skills in Cyberpunk were more generalised, but now each attribute has specific skill chains for particular weapon types and styles of play. And because skill points can be redistributed at will, you’re free to experiment as you please. Armour is also now linked to cyberware, so clothing options are entirely cosmetic. It’s a good change, but it’s a little weird how the game still rates clothing on a tiered scale. I guess that was kept in for crafting reasons.

Overall, 2.0 is an impressive update that makes Cyberpunk 2077 feel ‘complete’ in a way that it never quite did before. I already thought 2077 was excellent, and now it’s even better. In some ways it’s a shame that Phantom Liberty will likely be the last major piece of content released for the game but I do think it would be hard to integrate yet more ‘main’ style content into what is already a pretty packed experience. PL pulls its off, but only just.

As much as I love the game, by the time I’d wrapped up PL and most of the other core content, I was starting to burn out and had to take a break. You can have too much of a good thing, and PL does bloat the 2077 experience a little more than I’d like. If CDPR tried to add even more into the mix, I think it might prove extremely detrimental to the whole.

So if this is the end for 2077, it’s still a hell of a way to go out with a bang and PL clearly shows the developers have learnt a lot from the critical feedback of 2077 which hopefully means any potential Cyberpunk sequel can really hit the ground running on Day 1.

Phantom Liberty – 8/10

Cyberpunk 2077 (2.0) + Phantom Liberty – 9/10