It’s rare for a game to author its own redemption story in real time, but that’s exactly what CD Projekt Red pulled off. What launched in 2020 as a buggy, over-promised mess is now, thanks to Update 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion, one of the most confidently designed open worlds on PC. We spent another 40 hours back in Night City to see if the glow-up holds.
🔧 The Verdict
★★★★★ 9.3 / 10
A complete systems overhaul plus a spy-thriller expansion turn Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it always wanted to be — dense, dangerous, and gorgeous on PC.
Update 2.0: The Overhaul That Changed Everything
Before talking about Phantom Liberty, it’s worth dwelling on Update 2.0, because without it, the expansion wouldn’t land nearly as well. CD Projekt Red gutted the perk trees, rebuilt the police and NPC AI, retooled vehicle combat with actual car chases instead of scripted set pieces, and reworked cyberware into a slotted system that finally makes build diversity feel meaningful. Where the original game’s skill trees felt like spreadsheets, the new system feels like character-building — you can genuinely commit to a stealth netrunner, a berserk melee brawler, or a gunslinger who never touches a hacking terminal, and each build feels distinct in how combat plays out.
Dogtown: A Masterclass in Density
Phantom Liberty’s new district, Dogtown, is a masterstroke of level design — a walled-off, lawless enclave stacked vertically with verticality-driven combat arenas, black market economies, and faction politics that ripple outward into the main plot. It’s a smaller map than Night City proper, but every square meter is doing work: side content here doesn’t feel like padding, it feels like connective tissue for the district’s identity as a place where desperate people make desperate deals.
Idris Elba and the Spy-Thriller Plot
The expansion’s central story, involving a black-ops FIA agent and a downed presidential shuttle, gives Cyberpunk 2077 something it never quite had before: genuine narrative restraint. Where the base game sometimes leaned on spectacle, Phantom Liberty is a tighter, more paranoid spy thriller, complete with a genuinely divisive late-game choice that splits the story into two dramatically different endings. Solomon Reed’s arc, in particular, is a career-best performance that gives the expansion emotional stakes far beyond “stop the bad guy.”
“The choice at the heart of Phantom Liberty isn’t good versus evil — it’s loyalty versus self-preservation, and the game refuses to tell you which one is right.”
Combat and Traversal, Reworked
Vehicle combat is a genuine addition rather than a gimmick — you can now shoot from cars while driving, and police chases have actual escalation tiers instead of enemies teleporting in front of you. Relic-based abilities introduce short-cooldown power moves (a Sandevistan-style time slow, a blink-teleport for netrunners) that make combat feel closer to a boutique action game than the more methodical shooter the base game leaned toward.
How It Runs on PC in 2026
This is the category where Cyberpunk 2077 has completed its most dramatic transformation. Path tracing (Overdrive mode) remains one of the most demanding visual showcases on PC, genuinely worth experiencing on an RTX 40- or 50-series card with DLSS Frame Generation enabled — the lighting in Dogtown’s neon-soaked alleys is a legitimate tech demo for what ray tracing can do in an open world. For more modest rigs, standard ray tracing or even rasterized settings still hold up remarkably well thanks to years of optimization patches; stuttering issues that plagued the original release are largely resolved, and shader compilation stutter — once a notorious complaint — has been significantly reduced through pre-caching improvements.
Ultrawide and multi-monitor support are excellent, HDR implementation is one of the best in any open-world game, and mod support through tools like Cyber Engine Tweaks has grown into a genuinely essential ecosystem for anyone wanting deeper customization.
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Update 2.0 fixed nearly every systemic complaint | Requires the base game plus expansion, a real time investment |
| Dogtown is exceptionally dense, high-quality content | Overdrive ray tracing still demands top-tier hardware |
| Vehicle combat finally feels intentional | Some legacy bugs from the base game persist in older side quests |
| One of the best-looking games on PC, period | The main Night City map can feel emptier by comparison now |
Final Thoughts
Cyberpunk 2077 in its current state is a genuine PC showcase — a redemption story validated by years of unglamorous, patient engineering work. If you bounced off the game at launch, this is the version that was always meant to exist. Phantom Liberty doesn’t just add content; it demonstrates what the base systems can do when they finally work as intended.
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