Cyberpunk 2077: promise of a generation, mockery of a generation. Once hailed as the GTA killer, subsequently reviled as little more than a gilded dollhouse with a façade front. The team over at CDPR have been dragged painfully through the mud for their efforts in creating and spreading the Cyberpunk lie, that it was a game heralding the 'next generation of Open World game', focusing on 'unparalleled levels of player choice' absolute bursting with 'immersion and belief'. The game that as delivered wasn't bad, some years ahead of it's time graphically perhaps, with great gameplay, a stellar narrative, (I know some people grumble about how much it was a 'Silverhand story', but I think Silverhand is an excellently written foil for the protagonist so I loved it.) and some enjoyable exploration activities relatively in line with what you'd expect from a Cyberpunk open world. Unparalleled freedom? Next generation open world? Nah. And in the years since, it hasn't been until now that CDPR have had the balls to try and attempt to redeem their perception as two-bit shysters with their final hail mary: The Phantom Liberty.
Actually, I suppose this is a 'hail mary' on two fronts, because as important of an aspect as the DLC of Phantom Liberty is- the entirety of Cyberpunk underwent a 2.0 update to bring the game more in line with what people hoped it would be. And 2.0, for once, in not really an exaggeration regarding what this game has done. They totally retooled the levelling from the ground up to make every individual perk more impactful and, crucially, ensure a player can spend their valuable points to attune their playstyle to several styles of weapon at once, instead of one main. They changed how itemisation works so that weapon levels are annihilated entirely (Thank the lord!) and any weapon can be used against any foe and actually have a chance to kill them! Yes, even the Iconic pistol you got in hour 4 that couldn't so much as scratch a fly in 1.6! And, increadibly, they actually built a real, functioning, police system! And car combat! And changed shooting to work with Stamina! And added a new special skill tree! And threw in a new arcade cabinet! And changed car handling to feel weighty! The amount of changes are actually insane, and they come to all owners of the game, not just DLC holders.
And after a lot of time getting to play the game, both as a brand new character and as retooling my old character to the changes, I genuinely think this is the best the game has ever felt. Totally rewriting combat to be about cooldowns, stamina management and quick bursts of actions followed by diving into cover- it reintroduces challenge back into action. It gives boss fights back their edge, turns a street brawl into a bit more than a steam roll. I'm also told it makes the game's 'super-tough' secret ending into something fearful, but I can't test that out for myself because the ending is still glitched and won't trigger for me. (Even with 85% relationship value. I'm just never going to get to play that ending, am I?) More than ever this feels like the kind of rework designed to make players less godlike without nerfing them into the ground. I've never really felt the urge before to slap on a 'survival mod' and play this like I do hardcore Skyrim, but 2.0 grounds me to the world so much I may have to give it a try: see how immersive this world can be!
Changes to car handling and functionality is also hugely appreciated given how important the car is to Night City navigation. Feeling the right amount of weight as you try to make a corner feels almost weird in the Cyberpunk engine, and for a change I'm actually happy when I see an objective several kilometres away because I want to drive there! The car combat is, as I suspected, more of a side-addition to the rest of the game- there's not really any main game purpose to it beyond pulling off a drive-by, if that's what you want, and Phantom Liberty adds a car-thieving radiant side mission which has to kind of ineloquently force you into it just to justify the feature's inclusion in the first place. Once you do get into those kinds of fights, they're pretty fun. Difficult in first person, due to the multi-tasking, but quick bursts of adrenaline which feel different from on-the-ground bouts, which is all you can really ask for at the end of the day. You also get some decent opportunities for car-v-car violence thanks to the police system.
But what of Phantom Liberty? The crown jewel itself, taking players to the new district of Dogtown and tasking them with becoming a secret agent in pursuit of a new avenue to save their life from the Relic? How does that fare? Well, that's a bit more complicated with a jumble of feelings and opinions to collate, but in this honey-moon state I can at least convey my feelings coming out of it- I loved it. Utterly and completely, I didn't want it to end and am eager to jump back in on my secondary playthrough once she's pimped out enough to handle it. (Because there are a few questionable combat scenario choices for a free-form RPG style game I wouldn't want to subject a low level character to.) I loved the new district and it's various dynamic gameplay opportunities, I loved the main narrative and how it becomes a personally intwined tangle of warring and muddled ambitions, I loved the characters and only really wish I got to spend more time around every single one of them, I loved the new end-of-DLC theme the game presents us with, very James Bond but with a it's own, almost Radiohead-reminiscent, vibe to it. And I loved the endings and how they interacted with the main game, with the Phantom Liberty specific ending doing a horrifically good job of depicting what it would be like to just extract V, driver of events that they are, out of the main story and solve their problems some other how. (I think that might be the singular most depressing ending CDPR have ever made. Glad I wasn't married to solving things that way and was only looking in out of curiosity. Few alternate game endings feel so definitively like 'the bad end' as that one does.) 
Dogtown is designed to feel like a slum even next to the worst of Night City, and with it's cluttered wartorn street patrolled by a makeshift paramilitary that have to employ mechs just to maintain some power over the scavs, daily air drops of supplies launched indiscriminately in fly-by drops and battled-over by the desperate, and a smash hit to performance the second you enter the district that isn't present anywhere else in the game- it earns it's reputation. There's a real present sense of claustrophobia within the confines of Dogtown that requires you to become quite familiar with it's local landmarks and vendors in a way you just didn't jumping across the vast confines of Night City in the main game, and considering Dogtown's political position as a rogue-state in tentative stalemate with the influencing forces around it, that seems fitting.
Solomon Reed, Song So Mi, Alex and all the members of the tight cast you get to interact with throughout Phantom Liberty are, typically for a CDPR project, complex and very human people that don't always act within the parameters you might expect. Those who watched the high-quality teaser trailer, and sense the Bond-style vibes might suspect they have a handle on the power struggles the narrative will present, but there's heaps more nuance and personality to unravel than I ever quite felt in a Bond project. I think that's what Cyberpunk has always managed to do so well, in a future drowned in performance and presentation, the grit of actual people underneath it all seeps through the cracks. The only problem being that this is a DLC expansion, and doesn't quite feel like one of the comparative size of, say, Blood and Wine. I know that CDPR themselves would probably say how they spent x amount of time cobbling together Phantom Liberty and that was every bit as comparable to Blood and Wine, but as someone who just rocked through it all- this feels more a like a 'Hearts of Stone'. I would have loved to spend a bit more time around these characters, but then- that is a good feeling to leave people on, now isn't it? 
Phantom Liberty perhaps marks the point where we can see what Cyberpunk was capable of all these years, and I have to be honest: It kind of makes me hunger for more. I would have loved if we could have gotten to a point where every year over these three since release a new DLC would have dropped which further expanded upon the base narrative and game in a substantial fashion, to cut us off when the game was finally feeling worthy of it's aplomb seems cruel. But it's done. We've already heard confirmation that work of the next Cyberpunk game, preliminary work presumably, is underway and that's not even likely in the near future because we've got a whole new custom-character Witcher game up next. I could not in good consciousness throw a score under this new version of the game, I have not been nearly as exhaustive in experiencing the game as I usually am, but I have enough hours with Cyberpunk under my belt already to be able to definitively say that this is a marked improvement. I've already recommended the game under stipulations, I recommend it for everyone today. And I'd probably even knock the game up a few points in score, were I the number scoring kind of guy. Is Phantom Liberty worth your time? As a send off to Cyberpunk? Absolutely. At the very least, it leaves a good taste in your mouth to chew on as we wait for the future of this franchise to blossom.
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