Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
CD Projekt RED · Shooter, RPG, Action
Overview
Phantom Liberty is a new spy-thriller expansion for the open-world action-adventure RPG Cyberpunk 2077. As cyber-enhanced mercenary V, join secret agent Solomon Reed to unravel a web of shattered loyalties and sinister political machinations.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT10,000 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
This verdict covers the Phantom Liberty expansion, judged on its own reviews. Recommendations far outnumber complaints, and plenty of short reviews call it one of the best expansions they have played. The praise centres on the spy-thriller plot, the cast (Idris Elba's Solomon Reed and Minji Chang's Songbird in particular) and choices with no clean answer. Reviewers who bring up the Dogtown gigs mostly rate them above the base game's side quests, and comparisons to The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone come up often, usually as compliments. Some also say the expansion and the free 2.0 overhaul that shipped with it turned Cyberpunk 2077 into the game they wanted at launch.
Bugs, crashes and quest softlocks turn up in more negative reviews than any other single problem, especially in the first weeks after launch. A long, scripted main quest that disables weapons, abilities and quicksaves annoys players who built V for freedom, and the late "Somewhat Damaged" horror sequence splits players: some call it a highlight, and a few say they quit there. The endings draw strong feelings. Many reviewers accept their bleakness as the point, but a vocal group feels the new Tower ending punishes them for trying to save V. Dogtown's frame rate, the price for a single district, and the Relic skill tree draw smaller complaints.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
A spy-thriller story some rank above the base gameHigh
The story is the theme reviewers raise most: 57% of longer reviews talk about the story or writing. They describe a tense political thriller full of betrayals, with Bond, Escape from New York and Ghost in the Shell as the usual touchstones, and some say it beats the base campaign. One reviewer wrote "With all the improvements and how naturally Phantom Liberty fits into the story, I wish this had been my first experience with Cyberpunk 2077." Set pieces get singled out by name: the casino infiltration at the Black Sapphire with the Lizzy Wizzy (Grimes) performance, the Chimera fight, the Killing Moon and the Bond-style credits. The comparison to CD Projekt's Witcher expansions appears in 6% of longer reviews and is usually favourable, though several say the expansion is closer to Hearts of Stone in size than to Blood and Wine. Some negative reviewers find the plot predictable, the premise of saving the president out of character for V, or the lighter dialogue jarring, and V saying "amazeballs" comes up again and again in negative reviews as an example.
Characters and performancesHigh
A third of longer reviews (34%) talk about the characters. Idris Elba's Reed is the character they mention most, and some call Songbird the real standout. Johnny Silverhand's new scenes, Mr. Hands as the Dogtown fixer, and the Aurore and Alex supporting cast are praised for depth. A few reviewers find Elba's American accent shaky, Songbird manipulative or unlikable, or Kurt Hansen underused. Some positive reviews are about little more than how attached the writer got to these people.
Choices that feel heavyMedium
One in five longer reviews (20%) mentions choices or decisions. Players say the main quest and the gigs keep forcing a "lesser evil" pick without enough information, and that the mid-story branch leads to two different final arcs with their own missions. One reviewer wrote only "I've never had such a hard time making decisions even in real life...", and another said "Really good story, and the choices feel tougher in my opinion." Negative reviewers counter that most dialogue options only change tone, and that V is pulled along by other characters' plans.
Gigs and side content that finally matterMedium
18% of longer reviews bring up gigs, side quests or Mr. Hands, mostly to praise them. Players contrast the base game's short jobs, where you clear out a building, with Dogtown gigs that have twists, bosses and moral choices, some of which echo later. "Phantom Liberty's gigs are utterly phenomenal." wrote one reviewer, and another put it more bluntly: "Literally every single gig in the Phantom Liberty is better than half of the main game's side quests". A few players note that the gigs fall into a pattern where the client turns out to be lying.
Music and the closing creditsMedium
10% of longer reviews praise the soundtrack, the new radio stations, Dawid Podsiadło's credits song or the Lizzy Wizzy concert. A few say the credits sequence alone was worth the price.
It slots neatly into the base gameLow
Players like that the expansion opens mid-campaign, adds a new main-game ending, and threads small callbacks through older quests. Some advise playing it as the last thing before the finale, while others recommend a fresh run so it feels like part of one story. The skip-to-expansion start is useful, though a few warn that it assumes poor earlier choices and hands out weak gear.
Where players are split
The endings, and the Tower ending in particularHigh
A quarter of longer reviews (25%) discuss the endings. Many of them accept the bleakness, and Johnny's line about there being no happy endings for "folks like us" turns up in a number of reviews. Not everyone takes it well: one recommending reviewer wrote "There is NO HAPPY ENDING to this game." and added that this was fine for some but not for them. The new Tower ending, where V survives at a cost, divides people sharply. Some call it "one of the best endings I have every experienced in a video game." Others call it misery for its own sake, and complain that V loses friends, partners, money and home over a two-year gap that no character tries to explain. An early negative review said "the alternate ending provided by Phantom Liberty is even more depressing than the endings of the base game." A few players tell others to skip it. Reviews that cite the ending as their reason for a thumbs-down often praise everything before it.
Dogtown as a placeMedium
16% of longer reviews talk about Dogtown. Fans describe a dense, vertical district with a stadium market, ruined luxury towers and the Black Sapphire, and say it feels more alive than the rest of Night City. One reviewer called the expansion "everything that makes the base game great distilled into a single small area." Others find it small, drab and samey. One reviewer noted "you can drive through the entirety of Dogtown in about 30 seconds if you go straight", and another wrote "Phantom Liberty takes place almost entirely in Dogtown, which is essentially a barely lit junkyard." Gate checkpoints and loading when entering by car also come up.
Price and lengthMedium
Value is argued in both directions. 11% of longer reviews say it was worth the money, often "worth every penny". 4% push back with "wait for a sale", "overpriced" or "should have been free". Length estimates range from under 10 hours for the main quest alone to 40 hours for a completionist run with gigs included. Asked whether it is worth buying, one reviewer answered "Yes, but not for full price." Another took the opposite view: "The price is quite steep for an expansion, but I guarantee you that by the end you will feel that you got value for your money."
The 2.0 overhaul that shipped alongside itMedium
12% of longer reviews talk about the free 2.0 update, mostly to credit it with better combat, perks, police and vehicle fights. A smaller group says the rework hurt the expansion for them: they lost old builds and clothing armour, met nerfed quickhacks and non-removable weapon mods, and some reported worse performance. Players disagree on how much of the expansion's praise really belongs to the free patch.
The "Somewhat Damaged" horror sequenceMedium
5% of longer reviews mention the late horror section on Reed's path, where V loses weapons and cyberware and must hide from an invulnerable robot. Opinion on it splits. Some name it a highlight; one player wrote that the section, "while a forced stealth segment is still very enjoyable and masterfully made". It turns up more often among critics, in 13% of longer negative reviews: "I hated the Alien Isolation section where you play cat-and-mouse with the invulnerable robot that insta-kills you." Others found it too long ("Tension gives way to tedium far too quickly."), and a few say they quit at that point.
The Relic skill treeLow
Some enjoy the new Relic abilities for mantis blades, gorilla arms and optical camo. Others call the tree thin and narrow, saying it does little for netrunner, gun or katana builds. As one put it, "The one disappointing aspect of the DLC is the new 'Relic' skill tree."
Car thefts and airdropsLow
The repeatable car-delivery jobs for El Capitan and the Dogtown supply drops are fun to some and filler to others. Complaints focus on frequency ("You will be DROWNING in requests to deliver cars") and on optional time limits that feel impossible to meet.
What frustrates players
Bugs, crashes and quest softlocksMedium
12% of longer reviews mention bugs or crashes, and the share rises to 28% of longer negative reviews, higher than for scripted missions or the horror section. The reports are specific: calls that never arrive, so the story cannot continue ("I can't complete the story because Mr.Hands won't call me to start gigs."), death loops in the Chimera escape, softlocks in the final mission ("The last mission softlocks my entire game."), corrupted saves, a disabled phone or inventory, invisible or floating cars, and a pistol stuck in V's hand during cutscenes. Many positive reviewers mention smaller bugs fixed by reloading. Complaints were heaviest at launch and fell over time (see section 3), but they never disappeared.
Scripted, linear missions that switch off your buildMedium
Only 4% of longer reviews raise this, but it appears in 15% of longer negative reviews. Players say the main quest leans on corridors, escort sections and quick-time prompts, and often removes double jump, quickhacks, weapons, the inventory or the minimap. Even a recommending review warned that "Many missions in this DLC are very scripted, single path, in the style of Call of Duty single player 20 years ago". Another reviewer listed the pattern: "Weapons and implants disabled? Check." Several were angrier about saving: "CDPR made the unfathomably stupid decision to prevent you from quicksaving at all in the middle of many of these long scripted sequences". A few hit the point of no return without warning and lost hours.
Dogtown performanceMedium
Players on otherwise capable PCs report frame drops as soon as they enter Dogtown: "I go from around 40 fps in the main regions of night city, and then suddenly to 15-25 right when going into dogtown." Another wrote "my framerate tanks to about %50 whenever I'm in Dogtown". Steam Deck owners warned others away ("Be warned SteamDeck owners."), and a few report memory leaks or needing an SSD. Some players say patches and new drivers fixed it, and a minority never had trouble.
Combat that punishes stealth, melee and netrunner buildsMedium
Players who built V for stealth or hacking feel the expansion forces gunfights. "If you're a stealth/quickhack build the expansions fights will be impossible" ran one warning. The Chimera boss, the Hansen memory fight, the spaceport defence and missions with respawning enemy hordes draw the most complaints, especially on Very Hard, and bullet-sponge enemies come up as well. A melee player concluded "it's a DLC designed for long range combat." Other players welcomed Very Hard finally feeling hard.
A slow, talk-heavy opening and lots of waitingLow
The two- to three-hour opening escort mission is a sore point for some ("The first hour of Phantom Liberty is pure pain."), though others call it a thrilling start. A smaller group finds the whole expansion too dialogue-heavy; one later negative review said "There is simply too much talking." Having to wait a day for someone to call before the next mission also grates ("every mission ends with "wait a day for blank to call you"").
Exclusive and missable rewardsLow
Players dislike that iconic weapons and cyberware are locked to one side of the final choice. One negative review counted the gap as "withholding not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, but 7 total Iconic Weapons". Some well-hidden iconics are easy to miss, and the black-market vendor only partly covers them.
No new romancesLow
A steady trickle of reviews, many half-joking, wish they could romance Songbird, Aurore, Alex or Reed.
Weapons tied to Twitch or PrimeLow
A handful of reviews object to iconic weapons released alongside the expansion that require gifting Twitch subscriptions or claiming Prime Gaming rewards: "Instead of gifting subscriptions on Twitch in exchange for a sniper ingame, let me gift you a negative review."
3. The player conversation
Most reviews are short verdicts ("Masterpiece", "best DLC ever"). Jokes about crying or being left depressed by the ending are common, mostly meant as praise; one recommending review simply ends by saying "it gave me depression". Longer reviews often come from players who returned after the 2.0 patch, usually with a Witcher 3 expansion as their yardstick, and in the launch weeks a few took jabs at Starfield. Negative reviewers are a clear minority, and many of them like the story but object to something else: scripted missions, the robot sequence, the Tower ending, or a bug that blocked them.
The positive share held fairly steady. Month by month it stayed between roughly 87% and 95% through 2025, then dipped into the mid-80s in several months of 2026, when fewer reviews came in. The reasons for disliking the expansion did change. In the first five weeks after launch, bugs or crashes appeared in 36% of longer negative reviews; among those written from December 2025 onward, the share was 14%. Complaints about scripted, forced sequences rose from 15% to 23% over the same span, and mentions of the horror section from 5% to 15%. Later critics mostly object to the design, and fewer report broken saves.
4. What the developers could do
- Fix the remaining progression blockers. Bugs appear in 28% of longer negative reviews, and the worst cases are calls that never arrive, Chimera escape death loops and final-mission softlocks that force players to reload hours back or abandon the expansion.
- Allow saving in long scripted sequences and warn before points of no return. Some players describe losing large chunks of progress to disabled quicksaves and unannounced locks on the ending path, and one player's top tip was to "make sure you create different manual saves before making major choices".
- Shorten "Somewhat Damaged" or offer an easier way through it. Some negative reviewers name it as the reason they quit or gave a thumbs-down, and even some who recommend the expansion hated it. One wrote "I really wish there was a way to skip it".
- Improve Dogtown performance. Frame drops on entering the district, Steam Deck slowdowns and memory-leak reports recur from launch onward and hit players whose PCs run the rest of Night City fine.
- Rebalance the big set-piece fights for non-gun builds. Stealth, netrunner and melee players say the Chimera, the respawning-horde defences and bullet-sponge enemies on Very Hard leave their builds useless.
- Make the path-exclusive iconic weapons obtainable on both paths. Players feel punished for a story choice when it costs them several iconic weapons, and the existing black-market vendor could sell them.
- Explain what happens to V's relationships in the Tower ending. Complaints about the new ending focus on partners and friends vanishing without V contacting anyone, which players call contrived.
- Make the Twitch and Prime weapons ordinary unlocks. A handful of reviews object to paying third parties for single-player gear sold alongside the expansion.
