Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty goes a long way toward fixing a flawed masterpiece

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?

---

The tragedy of Cyberpunk 2077, in brief, is that it’s always been an exceptionally good story-driven RPG lost in the mire of a far lousier open-world experience. The game’s new expansion, Phantom Liberty—which arrives next week, a whopping three years after Cyberpunk’s initial, disastrous launch in December 2020—works then because it tweaks both halves of the above equation. With its tale of mercenaries and super-spies in the war-torn district of Night City-adjacent Dogtown, it’s a more focused, more compact version of the Cyberpunk experience, almost entirely to its benefit.

That sense of compaction serves Phantom Liberty well because Cyberpunk has always, despite its vaunted scope, been much better in the small term than the large. That applies to its gameplay, which can be moment-to-moment thrilling even as the process of actually moving around Night City quickly becomes a tedious bore, and its storytelling, which thrills in tiny, somber moments despite its big-picture stuff constantly threatening to devolve into a slurry of knee-jerk cynicism and asinine future slang. The DLC does itself little favor by front-loading the latter material—and sidelining the game’s best character, Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand, at least for its first few quests. But it finds plenty of moments to celebrate the flawed humanity of this spectacularly shitty future as its 15-or-so hours of content present themselves. By the time we’d reached one of several endings to its story of spies, endangered heads of state, and split loyalties, it was easy to remember how beautiful Cyberpunk can be when it gets out of its own way. As anyone who survived the ride back in 2020 (or since) well knows, there are few big-budget video game power fantasies more willing to wax poetic on the nature of mortality and morality than this one.

Of course, as anyone who was around for launch will also know, Cyberpunk 2077 was, and still kind of is, a complete and utter mess from a technical point of view. Our time with Phantom Liberty was admittedly more stable than our original run through the game, but this is still, nearly three years later, the single title most likely to send us to the PS5’s “Whoops, sorry your game crashed!” screen. Meanwhile, some of its big action setpieces occasionally slowed the hardware to a crawl, and we also experienced myriad little bugs—features getting inexplicably locked out, resources failing to regenerate, etc., most of which were solved with a quick reload. The fact that you spend way less of your time with Phantom Liberty driving all over a massive, loading-intensive map seemed to cut down on some of the worst crashes. But anyone hoping the DLC would present the chance to play a “perfected,” or at least polished, version of this game might want to ratchet those expectations down.

Also likely to be disappointed: Anyone expecting an exciting new world to explore. (Much is made of how crappy and violent the bombed-out Dogtown is as an environment, but since the base game’s Night City is already crappy and violent, we barely noticed a difference upon crossing its heavily guarded borders. This is not a DLC for people who want to be transported to some whole other brilliant landscape.) Meanwhile, the expansion’s gameplay refinements are a bit trickier to talk about, because while this version of Cyberpunk 2077 is radically different in a lot of ways, many of the new tweaks that players are likely to encounter when they load up Phantom Liberty are actually part of the base game’s fairly massive 2.0 patch, which will be released for free to all players ahead of the paid DLC.

The thing is, almost all of the stuff in the patch is really, genuinely good—including a brand new set of skill trees that allow for far more interesting abilities and character builds, and automotive combat that is fun, if also pretty slight. (The driving itself? Still lousy, with some of the least-pleasant-to-control cars in digital memory.) Wrapping your brain around all the new systems is no small feat, especially if it’s been literally years since you last loaded up a save. But it’s also worth it, despite the irritation of having to re-apply 50 refunded perk points into the new systems as you try to remember whatever the hell you were doing with your late-game character. As dedicated hackers, for instance, we had a ton of fun with the new overclock mechanic, which allows you to burn health to fuel some joyfully excessive sprees of frying your opponent’s eyes/ears/brains/etc.; characters more focused on sneaking, stabbing, shooting, or any of the game’s other key verbs will find similar new toys to play with.

But once you separate out the robust patch material—and even if you don’t buy the DLC, you probably owe it yourself to reinstall the game and put these much-improved systems through their paces—you’ll find that Phantom Liberty itself doesn’t have much new to say about Cyberpunk’s basic sneak, hack, and shoot gameplay. There are a few clever hooks, as you infiltrate skyscrapers and high-stakes parties, but if you’ve spent 50 hours with the base game, you’ve seen most of Phantom Liberty’s tricks. (We will note, though, that the expansion includes way less busywork than the base game; you still get a hefty dose of side missions and gigs to tackle between big quests, but each one has at least some small tweak to make them stand out.)

No, where the DLC wants to hook you is with its story, and its characters. The former is modestly successful, as it tries to snare players with an Escape From New York-esque tale of a U.S. president whose plane goes down behind enemy lines, forcing your playable mercenary V to save them from a malevolent warlord. All of which is, y’know, fine—although you’re going to want your “Choom to English” dictionary handy to refresh yourself on all the nouns getting chucked at V’s head. The characters stuff is, unsurprisingly, way more successful, mostly centered as it is on two new major figures: Talented hacker Songbird (Minji Chang) and grizzled secret agent Solomon Reed (Idris Elba.)

Elba’s the big name here, obviously, and while his performance is less committed and all-encompassing than the one contributed by Reeves—who continues to throw himself into the role of ghostly asshole Johnny with glorious dedication, recording lots of new material for the expansion—Sonic The Hedgehog’s Elba is totally convincing and nuanced as a spy who’s been left out in the cold for far too long. (Also, the motion capture really is incredible; you keep catching your brain whispering “Holy shit, it’s Idris Elba!”) But Chang is just as good, really, with a more complicated part; as Phantom Liberty asks you to weigh various sides of its wetwork-heavy moral dilemmas, the strength and humanity of the characters in play keeps the whole thing from descending into nihilistic who-cares-ism. There’s a reason that that eventual ending sat with us for a long time after the credits rolled—something we haven’t really experienced with a game of this type since, well, Cyberpunk 2077.

Here’s the obligatory summing up, then: We might have to caveat and asterisk it half to hell, but this is still, undeniably, the best version of Cyberpunk 2077 that’s ever been made available to players. It’s still a buggy mess sometimes. It still has cars we genuinely hate driving. But this version of the game nevertheless makes it far easier for players to chip away at the crap to get to the masterpiece buried underneath it. If you’re the kind of player who wants to “wait for the patch” that raises the game to perfection, well … this ain’t it. But it might be the best we’re going to get. And it’s damn good, regardless.