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 nothing like the rest of Cyberpunk 2077. Idris Elba's Solomon Reed, an NUSA federal agent with his own tangled history here, anchors the story, and he's the best-written character CD Projekt Red has put in this game, partly because Elba underplays him in a cast that mostly doesn't.
I want to talk about one mission without spoiling it, because it's the reason I'd hand anyone this expansion. It's called Somewhat Damaged, it lands late in the path I chose, and it takes away most of what makes V powerful and locks you in a bunker with one enemy that hunts you through the dark. No wave combat, no quickhack spam, just you, vents, and a sound you learn to dread. 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 finished it at 1 a.m. with my shoulders 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 escape the NUSA's leash, splits the back half of the expansion 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. 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. Builds feel distinct now. My netrunner played nothing like the katana-and-chrome build I respecced into halfway through, and both are closer to the game CDPR described in 2020 than anything that shipped that year. The police finally got rebuilt too, escalating wanted tiers and car chases instead of cops teleporting in behind you. It stopped being a running joke, which is most of what it needed.
Dogtown keeps working after the story wraps. Kurt Hansen's gang politics make the district feel lived-in rather than decorative, and the stacked verticality, shanty towers connected by walkways and elevators, reads like nowhere else in Night City despite covering a fraction of the area.
The rough edges are familiar ones. Phantom Liberty doesn't open until a specific point in the main story, so newcomers wait hours for the good stuff. Vehicle handling still isn't right even after 2.0, and I met one NPC frozen mid-animation, arm out, holding an invisible drink, which felt almost nostalgic.
Three years ago this game got pulled off the PlayStation Store. Last week I recommended it to a friend without attaching a single disclaimer, and I didn't notice I'd done it until later. That's the review.