After one of the rockiest launches in gaming history, Night City has finally become the game players were promised. When Cyberpunk 2077 arrived in December 2020, it carried impossible expectations — and on last-generation consoles especially, it collapsed under them, launching in such a rough state that it was temporarily removed from the PlayStation Store. What followed is now the stuff of industry legend: years of patches, a complete gameplay overhaul, a superb expansion, and a reputation rebuilt piece by piece. The Cyberpunk 2077 you can play today is a different beast — and it is a great one.
Night City Still Steals the Show
You play as V, a mercenary in the neon sprawl of Night City, a Californian megalopolis ruled by corporations and haunted by the digital ghost of rockerboy-turned-terrorist Johnny Silverhand, played with world-weary charisma by Keanu Reeves. A heist gone wrong leaves a biochip in V’s head that is slowly overwriting their personality with Johnny’s — a ticking clock that gives the main story genuine urgency and emotional weight.
The city itself remains the star. Night City is dense, vertical and filthy in a way few game worlds dare to be: markets steaming beneath corporate towers, backstreet ripperdoc clinics, megabuildings swallowing entire communities. Districts like Watson, Westbrook and Heywood each have a distinct flavour, and simply driving through the city at night, rain on the windshield and synthwave on the radio, is an experience worth the price of admission alone. Quests — written by CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher 3 — are consistently excellent, full of moral grey areas, memorable characters and endings that rarely feel clean.
The 2.0 Overhaul Changed Everything
The turning point was the free Update 2.0, released in September 2023 alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion. It did not merely fix bugs — it rebuilt the game’s foundations. The perk system was scrapped and redesigned into meaningful skill trees that support real builds: a katana-wielding reflex build, a netrunner who hacks enemies through cameras, a chrome-heavy solo who shrugs off bullets. Cyberware now has capacity limits and trade-offs, armour comes from your implants rather than your clothing, stamina governs more than sprinting, and vehicle combat finally lets you fight from the driver’s seat.
The police system, once a running joke, now escalates believably, with officers pursuing you through the streets and MaxTac dropping in if you cause enough chaos. Enemy AI is smarter, driving is tighter, and the whole game simply feels sharper and more deliberate. Performance on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC is now rock-solid, with the current-generation versions offering performance and ray-tracing modes that finally do the art direction justice. The last-gen versions were left behind — support ended before 2.0 — but on modern hardware, this is the game that was promised in those early trailers.
Phantom Liberty: A Spy Thriller in Dogtown
The Phantom Liberty expansion takes V to Dogtown, a walled-off, war-torn district ruled by a militia strongman — and it is some of the best content CD Projekt Red has ever made. Recruited by Solomon Reed, an FIA sleeper agent played by Idris Elba, V is pulled into a spy-thriller plot of double-crosses and impossible choices, beginning with the small matter of rescuing the President of the New United States. Dogtown’s dense verticality shows the studio at its world-building best: crumbling stadiums turned black markets, half-finished resorts, and streets where every corner hides a deal or a threat. The expansion also adds a new ending to the main game — a haunting one that reframes everything that came before. If you play Cyberpunk today, Phantom Liberty is essential.
What Still Isn’t Perfect
For all its redemption, Cyberpunk 2077 is not flawless. The main story, while excellent, is shorter than many expect, and the lifepath prologues — Nomad, Streetkid, Corpo — promise more divergence than they deliver, funnelling quickly into the same narrative. Some systems still feel like missed opportunities: the wanted system, though improved, never quite becomes a playground on the level of GTA, and the city, for all its beauty, offers fewer interactive distractions than its density suggests. Occasional bugs still surface — a floating NPC here, a physics hiccup there — though they are now amusing rather than game-breaking. These are real flaws, and they are why the score below is not higher. But they sit on top of one of the finest RPGs of the last decade.
Playing It Today — Which Version Should You Get?
If you are coming to the game fresh, the choice is simple: get the Ultimate Edition on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S or PC. It bundles the base game with Phantom Liberty, and every copy on those platforms receives the transformative 2.0 update free, so what you play from the first hour is the rebuilt, definitive version. One important caveat for players still on older hardware: the PS4 and Xbox One versions never received Update 2.0 or Phantom Liberty — their final major patch was the 1.6 “Edgerunners” update — and they remain a shadow of the current release. They are best avoided unless you have no other option.
On PC, the game scales well across a wide range of hardware and looks spectacular with ray tracing enabled, while the current-gen console versions offer a stable performance mode that keeps Night City smooth in all but the busiest street scenes. Whichever platform you choose, budget proper time for it: a focused run through the main story and Phantom Liberty will take most players 50 hours or more, and completionists can easily double that exploring every gig, side job and scanner hustle the city offers. Few redemption stories in gaming have ended with a game this easy to recommend.
Verdict
It is worth pausing to appreciate how unlikely this outcome was. Games have stumbled at launch before, but few have fallen as far as Cyberpunk 2077 did — and none have climbed all the way back. CD Projekt Red could have cut its losses after the disastrous first year; instead it spent years and enormous resources fixing, rebuilding and ultimately transforming its game, and the result now stands as the industry’s benchmark for how to win players back.
Final score: 8.9/10. Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc is complete. With Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty — bundled in the Ultimate Edition — this is a great RPG that was worth the wait: a gripping story, a city like no other, and combat and build systems finally worthy of both. If you bounced off it in 2020, or never tried it at all, there has never been a better time to become a legend in Night City.
