Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Review: A Spy Rescue Story

Our verdict: 7.0. Reviewed at release in September 2023, on the version that shipped alongside Update 2.0.

Almost three years after a launch that went as badly as launches go, Cyberpunk 2077 has a proper expansion. CD Projekt Red has spent that time repairing the game and handing out smaller free updates, the Edgerunners one among them, but Phantom Liberty is the first thing they have charged for, in the tradition of The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. It does not arrive alone either. The free 2.0 update landed with it and overhauled close to every system in the base game short of the missions and the map, which means the question of whether the expansion is worth buying is tangled up with a much larger question about whether the game finally works.

The short answer on the second question is yes. The short answer on the first depends on what you were hoping for, because Phantom Liberty is a tight, contained Cyberpunk 2077 story of about twelve hours, and tight is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Ten jobs, and four of them are a corridor

Of the ten main jobs, the first four are almost entirely linear, moving from one firefight to the next with very little in between. It feels closer to a military shooter than to the role-playing game it is attached to. Dogtown does not really open up until part-way through the fifth mission, and once it does, the last few jobs close the space down again and go past in a flash, with the final quest Killing Moon as the exception that remembers what this game is good at.

A short expansion is not in itself a problem. The problem is what this particular shape does to the cast, because Phantom Liberty introduces a lot of people and then does not have the running time to develop any of them. Songbird, President Myers, Solomon Reed and Alex all share a history, and that history stays almost entirely off the page. They are spies, so the past is kept mysterious, and mystery is used here as a substitute for writing rather than as a set-up for it.

The spy thriller it keeps almost becoming

When the expansion leans into its influences it is excellent. There is a great deal of Bond and Mission: Impossible in here, and it surfaces in conversations where every line has to be weighed, in the gadgets, in a piece of face-swapping technology lifted straight out of those films, and in a blackjack game where you are quietly working out who is who at the table, which is Casino Royale with different chips. Those moments are the best thing in Phantom Liberty. There are not many of them.

The larger disappointment is that the story never commits to being a political spy thriller at all. You are working as a special agent for the NUSA, which is the premise, and the expansion would have been stronger if it had stayed inside that premise and told a self-contained story. Instead a central thread of it is woven back into the base game's narrative, and because the expansion sits in the middle of the main story, you already know roughly where things have to end up. Without going near the specifics: Myers' plane comes down in Dogtown with her and Songbird aboard, Songbird asks for help, and what she offers in return is a fix for the biochip with Johnny on it. You can see the shape of that bargain from the first hour. The ending still landed for me, bittersweet and more affecting than the predictability of the twists deserved, and the choice you make there can open an alternative ending back in the base game.

Idris Elba is very good in a part that is not

Elba plays Solomon Reed about as well as the role allows, and the role is a straight-laced government man who has been betrayed by that government repeatedly and appears to have made his peace with it. He knows Songbird and Myers let him die in the cinematic trailer and he is somehow fine with it, because it was the job, and he throws himself back into serving Myers without visible friction. Where there should be tension between old allies who did each other real harm, there is acceptance, and without that tension the whole expansion collapses into a rescue mission with better lighting. He also refuses to discuss the attempt on his life in any detail, which is the one thread that might have cracked him open.

Songbird, or So Mi, does get a genuinely tragic backstory, and Alex gets a decent amount of somber development out of a much smaller part. The biggest surprise is Johnny Silverhand. In the base game he is an annoying git by design, not helped by writing that never gave Keanu Reeves much to work with. Here he has a surprisingly large role in a story that is not about him, he develops, and the performance is noticeably better. I would take Phantom Liberty's Silverhand over the base game's any day.

Dogtown, and the side content in it

Dogtown looks superb at night, with its neon pyramid and a holographic projection the size of a skyscraper, and underneath that it is another district of Night City with fewer things to do in it and worse driving. The gigs and side jobs follow the base game's formula exactly. Most of them are unremarkable, which they were in the base game too, and a handful are good enough to justify clearing the board if that is how you play.

What 2.0 and the Relic tree do for builds

The expansion adds the Relic skill tree, which is a welcome way to specialise further, and it arrives on top of the enormous flexibility the 2.0 perk and skill rework brought to the base game. Together they push Cyberpunk 2077 much closer to an immersive sim than to the role-playing game it failed to be at launch, and our best builds guide covers what you can do with the room. The frustration is that Phantom Liberty barely uses it. Most of its missions are open gunfights with very little space for stealth or netrunning, so the build freedom the update just handed you is largely left on the table for the twelve hours you spend here.

The technical picture

CDPR and Nvidia continue to use this game as a showcase. Path tracing arrived in an earlier update, and Phantom Liberty and 2.0 added Ray Reconstruction to claw some of that cost back. It is impressive technology in its infancy and not really suitable for normal play yet. What matters more is the rest of it: the broken, stuttering, bug-ridden game of December 2020 has been fixed, comprehensively. If you have been waiting, this is the moment to start. Phantom Liberty is the first and last expansion Cyberpunk 2077 will get, which means V's story is now finished, and the base game underneath it is finally the one that was advertised.

Verdict: 7.0

Phantom Liberty is twelve good hours that keep gesturing at a better twelve. The spycraft is the best writing in the whole of Cyberpunk 2077 and there is not enough of it, the cast is too large for the running time, and the one character it built around a genuinely great actor is the one it gave the least to do. It is still the best reason to come back to Night City, and with 2.0 attached, the best reason to arrive for the first time. The rest of our Night City coverage is indexed on the main Cyberpunk 2077 guide, and the expansion's own weapons are ranked on our best weapons guide.