Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Review — Night City Redeemed

Score: 9.1 / 10 — The expansion that finally delivers on the promise of Night City, wrapped around a genuinely gripping spy thriller.

Introduction

It’s easy to forget how rocky Cyberpunk 2077’s launch was. Years of patches, a full engine-level overhaul with Update 2.0, and now the Phantom Liberty expansion have transformed it into one of the most complete open-world RPGs on PC. This review covers the current state of the base game combined with Phantom Liberty, tested on a desktop with an RTX 4070 and evaluated across both raster and path-traced rendering modes.

Story and World

Phantom Liberty drops V into Dogtown, a walled-off, lawless district controlled by a mercenary faction operating outside the NUSA’s jurisdiction. The plot is a tight espionage thriller involving a downed presidential aircraft, a double-crossing spymaster, and a returning cast member whose presence recontextualizes major decisions from the base game. It’s a smaller, denser story than the sprawling main campaign, and that focus works in its favor — pacing rarely sags, and the central relationship between V and the expansion’s key ally carries real emotional weight.

Dogtown itself is a triumph of environmental storytelling: vertical, dense, and layered with faction politics that spill into side content rather than sitting isolated from it. Update 2.0’s overhauled police and traffic systems also make the rest of Night City feel alive in a way it simply didn’t at launch.

Gameplay and Systems

The perk and cyberware trees were rebuilt from the ground up in Update 2.0, replacing the old sprawling skill web with a tighter, role-defining structure across combat, stealth, and hacking. Cyberware now occupies equipment slots with real trade-offs, making build planning feel meaningfully strategic for the first time. Vehicle combat, a new addition, is a fun if slightly shallow diversion that adds variety to Dogtown’s more open combat zones.

Netrunning and stealth remain the standout playstyles — hacking cameras, turrets, and enemy cyberware from a distance turns firefights into puzzles, while melee and gunplay builds now feel punchy and responsive thanks to combat animation improvements introduced alongside the expansion.

Graphics and Performance

This remains one of the best-looking games on PC, and with path tracing enabled it’s arguably the current showcase title for ray-traced lighting technology, with global illumination and reflections that transform Night City’s neon sprawl into something genuinely cinematic. That said, path tracing is punishing — even an RTX 4080 needs DLSS Frame Generation to hold a stable 60fps at 1440p. On more modest hardware, standard ray tracing or raster mode still looks excellent and runs far more comfortably.

Stability has improved enormously since launch. Over roughly 40 hours with Phantom Liberty, we encountered only minor visual glitches and no crashes, a stark contrast to the game’s rocky first year.

How It Compares

Compared to other open-world RPGs on PC, Cyberpunk post-2.0 sits closer to The Witcher 3 in narrative density than to sandbox-first titles like the GTA series. Against Baldur’s Gate 3, the two make an interesting contrast in design philosophy: Cyberpunk offers a handcrafted, singular protagonist story with limited branching, while BG3 offers systemic reactivity across an entire party. Neither approach is objectively superior, but players who want cinematic immersion over mechanical choice-tracking will find Cyberpunk the more satisfying of the two.

Pros and Cons

Verdict

Phantom Liberty is the expansion Cyberpunk 2077 needed to cement its reputation. Combined with the Update 2.0 overhaul, it transforms a famously troubled launch into one of the strongest open-world RPG packages available on PC today. If you bounced off the game in 2020, this is the version worth returning for.