It’s worth saying plainly at the outset: this review covers Cyberpunk 2077 as it exists now, patched, expanded, and rebuilt over years of post-launch work, culminating in the sweeping Update 2.0 overhaul and the Phantom Liberty expansion. The 2020 launch — the bugs, the console downgrades, the broken promises — is a well-documented chapter of gaming history, but it’s not this game anymore. What CD Projekt Red has shipped since is a fundamentally different, dramatically improved experience, and treating it as the same product being reviewed five years ago would be dishonest.
Story and Setting
You play V, a mercenary in Night City who picks up a job that goes wrong, leaving a digitized version of long-dead rockerboy revolutionary Johnny Silverhand embedded in their brain and slowly overwriting their personality. The core story — a race to remove the Relic before V loses themselves entirely — remains one of the strongest hooks in recent RPG memory, anchored by genuinely excellent writing for its major characters and a Night City that feels lived-in rather than decorative.
Phantom Liberty, the paid expansion set in the walled-off district of Dogtown, is where the writing peaks. It’s a tightly constructed spy thriller involving a stranded FIA agent, a conspiracy reaching the highest levels of a fractured American government, and a supporting cast that includes some of the best-written characters CD Projekt Red has produced. It also reworks the game’s ending structure, giving V’s story new possible outcomes that meaningfully change how the whole game reads in retrospect. Players need to reach a specific story checkpoint before the point of no return to access it, which is worth knowing before you dive in casually.
Gameplay and Systems
Update 2.0 is effectively a re-engineering of the game’s RPG backbone. Skill trees were rebuilt from scratch, the old armor system was scrapped in favor of a Cyberware system that makes body augmentation a core build decision rather than a side stat, and combat — gunplay, melee, and hacking alike — feels considerably more responsive and purposeful than it did at launch. Police AI, once a running joke, now escalates believably, from patrol cars to full MaxTac response squads, and vehicle combat was added wholesale, giving car chases actual stakes for the first time.
None of this changes the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is still built on its original 2020 foundation. Some systemic ambitions from the original pitch — deeper simulation of Night City’s population, more reactive world systems — remain more limited than genre peers with a similar open-world scope, and side content, while generally well-written, can still fall into familiar open-world padding in its lesser missions. These aren’t launch-era bugs; they’re structural ceilings that patches alone can’t fully erase. What they don’t do is undercut the core loop, which is now genuinely compelling: build crafting, gunplay, and hacking all feel like meaningful choices rather than the loosely-connected systems they were in 2020.
Visuals, Sound, and Performance
Night City remains one of the most visually striking open worlds in gaming, and on current-gen hardware, it’s finally running the way it always should have. PS5 and Xbox Series X/S both received proper next-gen versions with ray tracing options and stable frame rates, and PC performance, while still demanding at max settings with path tracing enabled, is far more consistent than the launch-era horror stories. A 2025 Nintendo Switch 2 port extended the game to hybrid hardware, with reviewers noting real technical compromises necessary to hit that platform’s ceiling, but a functional, playable experience nonetheless. It’s important to note that the 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty are exclusive to current-gen platforms — anyone still on base PS4 or Xbox One is left with the older, less refined version of the game.
The soundtrack, voice acting, and sound design remain a high point across the board, and the Ultimate Edition’s presentation — bundling the base game and Phantom Liberty together — is the version most new players should be buying.
What Works
The core RPG loop is now genuinely satisfying in a way it wasn’t at launch, with meaningful build variety, responsive combat, and a police and traffic system that finally reacts believably to the player. Phantom Liberty stands as some of CD Projekt Red’s best writing to date, and the overall package — story, atmosphere, character work — holds up as one of the strongest RPG experiences of the current generation.
What Doesn’t
The bones of the game are still five years old, and some structural limitations in world simulation and side-content depth remain no matter how many systems get reworked on top of them. Cross-gen players and anyone still on last-gen consoles won’t get the full experience. Occasional bugs still surface, though at a small fraction of launch-era frequency, and newcomers need to be mindful of the Phantom Liberty access window to avoid missing it on a first playthrough.
Verdict
Cyberpunk 2077, in its current Ultimate Edition form, is one of the genuine comeback stories in modern gaming — a title that used relentless post-launch investment to close most of the gap between its original ambition and its delivered product. If you skipped it in 2020 waiting for it to get good, that wait is over. This is now a deep, confidently built RPG with an excellent central story, one of the best expansions in the genre, and technical performance that finally matches its art direction. It’s an easy recommendation for RPG and open-world fans on current-gen consoles or PC, provided they buy the version that includes Phantom Liberty. The only players who should stay away are those stuck on last-gen hardware, where the old, rougher version of the game still lingers.