Welcome to Dogtown — hands-on with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

We got to sit down with the CD Projekt Red team at Summer Game Fest to check out Phantom Liberty, the upcoming expansion to the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. In it, we are certainly getting plenty of fresh post-capitalistic goodness, but that’s not telling even half the story. Speaking of the story, let’s start there and then we’ll get back to the “and then some”, shall we?

I’m going to straight up – I ran into every single bug with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 at least thrice, and I was playing on PC. I know others had it worse. I made it a dozen or so hours into the game, lost my save file twice, and just threw up my hands in frustration. I wanted to love this world the team had built, but damn if it just wouldn’t let me. I shelved it with the promise to myself that I’d go back to it eventually. Six months later I installed it again and watched my main choom Jackie Welles twist like a tornado, drilling himself through the floor and breaking one of the very first quests and uninstalled it again. Six months more and I tried again and it finally caught me, and boy did it. I have every achievement in the game and have beaten the game twice. It’s easily one of my favorite new properties, and I absolutely devoured it.

Cyberpunk 2077 told the story of V, a runner who, through a cavalcade of bravado-based stupidity, ended up with a prototype hitchhiker copy of a long-dead terrorist/rocker named Johnny Silverhand. Unfortunately that second personality came with a price – imminent death. If you’ve not beaten Cyberpunk 2077, that’s all I’ll say about the storyline, but suffice it to say it’s a doozy of a ride, as only the storytellers at CDPR could pull together. Phantom Liberty takes place directly after the ending of Cyberpunk 2077, with V still struggling to figure out how to get Johnny out of their head. That’s when a whole new tragic opportunity drops directly in their lap, only this time the stakes are far bigger.

Though we aren’t quite clear yet on how we end up there, V is presented with an opportunity via another runner named Songbird. She has some wire directly into V’s head and offers the opportunity to remove the Relic program Silverhand from their head, provided that V helps her with a little problem. Songbird is working for President Myers, the President of the New United States, and unfortunately, as they pass over the Dogtown suburb of Pacifica, they are targeted by missiles, downing the plane, with Myers aboard. Your job is simple – save the President. If you’ve grown up on 80s movies directly injected into your head, you smell the setup for Escape from LA / Escape from New York, and also if you are like me, you can’t wait to play it.

Before I kicked things off, the CDPR dev teams asked what type of runner I’d like to play – a stealthy hacker type, or a run and gun assault type. I went with the stealthy hacker type, wanting to see some of the new skills Phantom Liberty would bring to the table. Slowly inching my way through the burning husks of buildings and cars, I used a far more balanced set of hacking powers, disabling and distracting enemies when I couldn’t outright kill them with overloads. Finding the crashed plane, I popped the hatch and found myself with a boot to the chest and a gun to my head. It turns out that President Myers is quite capable of rescuing herself, thank you very much. Capable as she is, we’d need to work together to escape as the denizens of Dogtown descended on our position.

As I mentioned, I could immediately feel a lot of polish and re-balancing on the hacking systems for 2077. I can’t quite put my finger on it without more time, but the cooldown timers felt tighter, and the powers played off one another in a more seamless and connected way. Though I didn’t have the cycles to play through a second time myself, I did watch a few other journalists play the run and gun and that looked equally as tuned. There are a number of new skills and hacks to unlock, but that’ll have to wait for another day – suffice it to say, combat has gotten a bit of a tune.

Phantom Liberty is a fully packed expansion not unlike the two we got for CDPR’s other best-seller, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. It has new quests, gig types, tech, cyberware, weapons, vehicles (which you can shoot from!), and an entirely new Relic skill tree, though again we didn’t have enough time to poke through that for any length of time. The aim with all of this combined is simple – give Cyberpunk 2077 a full spy-thriller makeover, complete with new tools and tech to make it look and feel the part, all while expanding on the already-established storyline. I’m eager to see how Idris Elba’s character, Agent Solomon Reed, folds into the game, but the broad strokes seem to be that he’ll be the one to help orchestrate our escape from Dogtown with President Myers. I’m hoping it’s far more than a simple cameo – time will tell.

The next thing I noticed about Phantom Liberty was the verticality of it all. Night City wasn’t all that tall for most of the city, but Dogtown reminds me of the tighter corridors of a place like downtown Los Angeles. It also had a lot more detritus and burned out husks skirting said buildings, creating shooting cover as well as stealth options, rather than duking it out in the middle of the streets.

It’s hard to demo a game like Phantom Liberty in less than 30 minutes, but it did accomplish the task – I wanted more. It’s an expansion, to be sure, but it feels like a second chance. We played on the Xbox Series X, but the framerate, resolution, and overall performance was absolutely exceptional. The tighter gameplay and combat felt like the experience the team wanted us to have right out of the gate. It may have taken me three bites at the apple to finally get hooked by Night City, but it only took 30 minutes to have me primed and ready to return when the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty ships on September 26th, 2023 on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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