Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Phantom Liberty is a great addition to the main game of Cyberpunk 2077 and worth your time if you enjoy the main game. The story suffers from some pacing issues and has an underwhelming antagonist but is decent overall. The dialogue and performances are fantastic with some great characters who slot in perfectly to this world. The new area, Dogtown, is a great addition to Night City and adds plenty of flavour to an already aesthetically diverse city. The expansion doesn't do an awful lot to add to the gameplay. There are some cool new weapons and new powers but they never feel like the change the gameplay in any significant way. In practice the additions only make V more overpowered which is a problem Cyberpunk suffers as you progress through the game. A real strength of the expansion are the new side missions which were some of my favourite in the game. CD Projekt really put a lot more effort into these missions which is welcome as I feel they represent the core experience of playing as a mercenary. Overall, if you didn't like the main game of Cyberpunk 2077 then you will not find much new here. For fans of the original game, it is a great expansion and you will get a lot out of it.

Excellent expansion

First I have to say that I spent about 60 hours in 7 days in Cyberpunk 2077 and I'm not done yet. So I bought PL with some hopes. However, all hopes disapeared in first hour of playing. It turned to nightmare. Why? - you're dealing with the action and Songbird / Myers is talking to you. How I'm supposed to be concentrated on both things? - too much action in first hour. It's like Doom but with talks and pressing other keys on keybord (I really don't get it why Cyberpunk is using F and not E ... anyway) - a light is sometime gone and done aka too dark. I couldn't see a thing in underground garage. Luckily for me, I know some bug in Cyberpunk (60 hours of playing) which will give a light for a few seconds. - I gave up in "Flee the Chimera". I died a lot when I ran from first door (there is a bug). Second door was also some dying. However, the final "I'm done with it" was when I haven't time to press F for opening elevator. I simply die. (I saw a few walkthrought, did same thing and died anyway). Verdict: great idea but terrible execution. I'm going to do some gigs, NCPD jobs or to the shower with Panam ... for calming down.

The story alone is top notch, without spoiling too much, in my opinion it protrays a much more unforgiving nightcity than the base game ever did, something the Anime Edgerunners also did. There are some great voice acting from the newer NPCs. The new district feels like it has much more vertical depth than the base game. However the experience was ruined by a bug in which the UI causes the mini map to freeze status (i.e. showing you in a hostile zone even after you leave it) and interactabe popups to either disappear as you approach them or never appear in the first place. I had used an old character I created when the base game launched, and not replayed the whole base game as the developer recommends. So I dunno if the bugs are related to that or not. Very early in the expansion, I had noticed certain UI pop ups were not appearing, so I saved and reloaded that save to cause the UI pop to appear. I used this multiple times to fix mini map and pop up bug over ten times throughout much of the DLC story. There was one occasion this bypass fix did not work and I had to resort to an earlier save causing me to lose about an hour already trying to bypass the bug and lost story progression.

Great DLC, make more like this and i'll buy. Wtf with this DRM bs?