Cyberpunk 2077 was just an “okay” game at launch. If you took away all the glitches and just looked at it for what it was it really just felt like a bland FPS RPG that invested a great deal of work to create the atmosphere and aesthetic of a cyberpunk dystopia but not much else. While a lot of effort has been put into the game to overcome its technical challenges there wasn’t really much that CDPR could do to fix this fundamental fact about how the core of the game worked… but they’ve tried anyway. About two months ago now they released both the “Cyberpunk 2.0″ patch and the game’s first (and only) DLC to help revamp the game from a gameplay perspective as best they could, and I decided to revisit the game to see if it was any better because of it.
A note before we begin: I played Cyberpunk 2077 on launch and haven’t touched it since, so my recollection of updated game mechanics are based on memories from three years ago. Most of my discussion about changes should be accurate but if there are errors referencing things that were always in the game as new features then I apologize in advance.
The 2.0 patch changed a lot about how certain parts of the combat and leveling mechanics worked, so rather than hope my old character properly carried over into the DLC I just restarted the game with a new character. Immediately I was hit with a wave of memories about 2077‘s faults and in many ways very little of it has changed: the fixer and cyberpsycho side quests are still linear one-note affairs where you just need to go into a small area to get something and then leave, the gunplay is still functional but doesn’t make much of an impact, and it really feels like being a Netrunner (the walking hacker that can hack people as well as computers) is the main way to play the game. Trying to balance the power of the Netrunner skills was one of the many updates in 2.0, as half of their more powerful abilities like turning off eyes and making enemies commit suicide have either been dramatically increased in cost or have reduced functionality (sometimes they don’t work at all but I doubt that was intentional). Additionally there’s new tech that you can add to your kit in place of the ability to hack enemies that give you things like a cloaking device or bullet time, which feels like it opens up builds a lot more than the first game. I still don’t really see why you’d want to sacrifice your ability to make people burst into flames by looking at them just for the ability to slow down time, but at least the option is there. Personally if I play it again I might try a Ghostrunner style build with bullet time and air dashing, but that could just be me wanting to wrap up this review and go try Ghostrunner II.
The leveling system has also been completely revamped to try to make progression more rewarding. Gone are the low rewards and occasionally wonky layout of the perk trees from the original game and instead there are much more reasonably set up perk trees with mechanical rewards across five different abilities. Now you can focus much more directly on the abilities or weapons you want to use and gain cool things to do with them, such as blocking bullets with swords, always dealing max damage at any range with pistols, or being able to do slow motion air dashes. All of this certainly added some spice to the combat by giving you powerful abilities that actually feel like you’re a cybernetically enhanced being, but a lot of it is also less generally “good stuff for your items” and instead pushes gameplay styles for things like Netrunning that you might have no interest in but also feel the need to invest points in just to get to higher bonuses later. This is the way it goes for many skill trees in games of course, picking something boring so that you can get something cooler later, but it’s a shame that some styles of play like swords and thrown weapons eat much better than others as you level up.
For all the minor stat bonuses that you used to get the 2.0 update added a “skill system” as well that gives you passive experience for actions you take in the game across five paths: Headhunter, Netrunner, Solo, Shinobi, and Engineer. The trick is that the game NEVER TELLS YOU what actions you take will level up which skill (after all, aren’t you by definition a “Solo”?), but fortunately that’s what the internet is for. According to the internet you get Headhunter points for killing people with stealth and headshots, Netrunner for hacking, Solo for using heavy weapons, Shinobi for using bladed weapons, and Engineer for using explosives and smart weapons, and as you level these skills you’ll get minor bonuses that aid in further enhancing that playstyle. For example, early levels of Solo increase your health by a few points while early Netrunner gives you a 5% recharge on your RAM, though by max level you’ll get more notable bonuses like being able to instantly kill enemies or hack enemies through walls. It’s a rewarding “play your way” system that makes you feel like you’re actually getting prizes for playing the game how you want to play it, though with the repeated comment that you can’t easily tell how these skills are earned which can be a little frustrating. To the game’s credit you will also find consumable items throughout the world that let you gain huge boosts of experience points in every one of these skills, so if there’s a particular thing you seem unable to get experience in you’ll still earn enough through loot to get the early levels of a given skill.
The other way to get minor stat increases is through your cyberware implants, as the 2.0 update completely redid cyberware mechanics as well. For starters you now have a limit to how much cyberware you can have at a time, much like the mechanics in the pen and paper game, which is necessary because for the most part every place that sells cyberware now essentially sells everything to you at any given time. In the old system you had to hunt down the best “ripperdocs” to find the ones that had the highest level/rarity of gear, but now basically everyone sells everything with the catch being that everything is sold at or just above the level your gear currently is. Have a piece of blue cyberware as your highest rarity and everything else will be blue too (or purple, if you’re at that threshold) and the game also offers you the ability to upgrade the cyberware you currently have installed instead of swapping in and out to new shiny gear. Most of the cyberware you find will come with very minor stat boosts, such as 0.5 extra health for every point of “body” your character has or 2.4% headshot damage, and when you’re upgrading your gear you can unlock a skill that lets you swap these bonuses around to fit your preferences. It’s a fine system that makes you feel more and more like you’re making a build and also makes getting cyberware in general less frustrating, since you aren’t constantly running from ripperdoc to ripperdoc like a mother of six on Black Friday looking for the best sword arms.
Along with all these balance and system updates they also tried to revamp the police response to crimes and add in vehicle combat, neither of which are really worth mentioning. The police system in games like Grand Theft Auto matters because in those games your primary nemesis is the police, who will routinely attack you at the end of a mission due to all your crimes, but in Cyberpunk 2077 those sorts of scripted police alerts almost never happened and if they do it’s only a “one star” that is easily avoided. The only time you’re going to run into a highly aggressive police presence is if you go out of your way to be a mass murderer on the streets or when playing the DLC where the “police” in the area are the bad guys, but even then it only comes up a few times. Vehicle combat happens even less, as outside of a new poorly-designed side mission that’s about stealing cars you’ll almost never find yourself engaged in a shootout while driving. It’s a little disappointing because you have some new hacks you can use against cars but since it never came up I only got to make a few bikes spontaneously explode once.
With all these changes in mind we come at last to the DLC, Phantom Liberty. Set primarily in the lower left corner of the city map the story is located in “Dogtown,” a rundown part of Night City that a branch of the military gained a foothold in during a recent war and just never left. These mercenaries are the law and what law there is practically doesn’t exist, so it’s an impoverished, cut-throat, destitute place that we’re supposed to believe is a haven for people with no where else to go but is also so strict about who they let in or out that you have to sit through a full body scan every time you want to enter or leave. V gets drawn into area by a Netrunner named Songbird onboard the game’s equivalent of Air Force One, which is about to crash into Dogtown and V is the only person they can call for help thanks to Songbird’s ability to hack into the implant in V’s head. Outside of the rep-boost V stands to gain for saving the President you’re also offered a chance by Songbird to save yourself from the implant (the prototype chip in your head that’s slowly killing you throughout the main game) for good, so V has double the motivation to dive headfirst into the mess.
As a story the plot of Phantom Liberty is fine as a spy/noir tale about who to trust and when does duty supersede personal history or friendship. Idris Elba does a fine but relatively muted job conveying his role as Solomon Reed, a burned secret agent you’ll meet early on, and unlike the other storylines in 2077 this one kept me relatively engaged throughout. There’s a small cast of characters, almost every mission you go on feels important, and there’s a number of fun “spycraft” set pieces like being undercover at a fancy party that we never had in the main campaign’s bland “so do you want to stealth or shoot your way through this” mission design. Most of all you feel like you get good use out of actually being in a cyberpunk world as you scan targets with your software or impersonate people with holograms. It’s great world building and ends with a tense sequence of missions that will keep you on your toes and leave you guessing if you made the right choices until the very end… and even then you may not be sure.
However even if Phantom Liberty’s story didn’t exist I’d still give major accolades to the DLC for fixing other major problems that were present in the base game, especially with the side mission design. As I complained earlier in the review the side missions in the main game are usually dull, drab, linear affairs were you either have one or two conversations and then leave or go into an area to find one item and then leave. The closest you got to being able to break the mold of these missions was to either just not them at all (by telling a character in your conversations that you refused to help them any more) or maybe shooting someone so you could pick up the item you needed ten seconds faster. Not so in Phantom Liberty, where almost every side mission contains some sort of moral choice or twist akin to CDPR’s quests in Witcher 3. Any examples I give would be spoilers but there’s the usual stuff of “the person who gave you the quest wasn’t telling the truth” or “wait mister mercenary I have a better offer than what you’re being paid” that you might expect, and maybe one or two that you might not. Several side missions also have certain conditions or aftereffects that only trigger based on missions that you completed previously in the main game or the choices you make within the DLC missions themselves, which makes the game feel much more alive than the sterile, self-contained nature of each storyline in the main game.
The level design in Dogtown is also much better, bringing in the Deus Ex design philosophy of giving multiple options to navigate levels that is so sorely missing in the main game. A locked door in Dogtown will frequently be something you can open with several skills rather than just strength or tech arbitrarily, and even if you don’t have those options there’s almost always an alternate route you can find with a little exploration. It’s not ideal of course, especially when you encounter certain conversations that can only be peacefully resolved with a specific background or skill check, but it’s far better than it was where the base game locked you into choosing to either fight twenty guys or remember to invest points in tech from the start of the game. The balancing of these check scores is in Phantom Liberty definitely a little more questionable, as many of these doors will have score requirements of anywhere from 15 to 19 which depending when you start the DLC might be a tough hill to overcome. But again, thanks to the better level design these are just a little misstep in balance rather than anything that ruins a particular mission.
On the technical side the game is better than it was but it’s still no where near where you’d think a game that’s been out for three years should be. There aren’t as many obvious issues, for example I couldn’t just immediately summon a new version of my car after it was destroyed, but there’s still a lot that’s not really acceptable to me even in a game this size. Cars will routinely stop and sit idle in the street for no reason, leading to spectacular crashes where cars will fly fifty feet in the air before landing on the road and continuing on. Characters will stand inside the environment, pick up and drink from invisible drinks, just appear/disappear out of nowhere during scripted scenes, and very specific areas of the game just completely overexpose the skin on every character within range. There’s a number of frustrating mechanical issues as well, such as not being able to loot bodies that are marked as lootable, completed quests taking forever to stop telling you they’ve been completed, and side missions repeatedly intruding on main story missions just because the trigger for them happens to be on the other side of a wall. So while the game is technically in a better state than it was three years ago, it’s still a mess compared to what it should have been but might be in enough of a state to be acceptable to people who like Skyrim.
Phantom Liberty is a DLC that makes me very sad. On the one hand it continues CDPR’s track record of making DLC that surpasses the base game but on the other hand that wasn’t very hard to do. CDPR has said this will close the book on Cyberpunk 2077 as they move ahead to other projects (all Witcher all the time) but the improvements in Phantom Liberty feel like 2077 finally found its stride despite all of the flaws in the main game still holding it back, and I wish there was another DLC or two in the pipe that could take these improved design philosophies to the next level. If you liked the original game but haven’t come back yet then you should get an absolute blast out of Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update, especially with the gameplay updates that improve your moment and weapon abilities. If you’d like the see what the game could have been then Phantom Liberty is worth experiencing for that as well, but the design of the quests and navigation hasn’t carried over to the rest of the game (that’d require a lot more than a 2.0 patch) and as such Phantom Liberty is a tasty filling between two boring pieces of bread. You might like the taste once you’ve managed to chew through the bread, but you’ll wonder if all the time you spent chewing was worth it.
