Nearly three years on, CD Projekt has patched a lot of holes in Cyberpunk 2077, but the twopronged addition of its 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty DLC suggests it still isn’t quite at one with itself. Indeed, while the free booster aims at increasing your ability to express yourself in its open world, conversely, the paid-for episode is compact, intimate and concerned with events behind closed doors. Yet because it’s a standalone product, with no requirement to fit around the full game’s lofty plein-air ambitions, Phantom Liberty gains genuine freedom. Piggybacking on the groundwork of fiction already in place, it focuses on delivering a pulsating plotline, and hits its mark.
Billed as a spy thriller, yanks protagonist V into the orbit of the New USA government and the FIA (a sort of FBI-CIA mashup). An agent known as Songbird initiates contact remotely, apparently with the President aboard a jet that’s about to crash into Dogtown, a no-go enclave of Night City. Their plight triggers a retrieval mission reminiscent ofbecomes a markedly more glamorous venture than that of working with street fixers, or Johnny Silverhand, who sulks from the sidelines as V gets sucked deeper in.
