Over the past few weeks, Cyberpunk 2077 has been back on everyone’s lips. I got home from the Summer Game Festival and immediately started downloading CD Projekt Red’s controversial RPG on my PlayStation 5 because – after I saw Phantom Freedom – I needed a save file ready to go on my PlayStation 5. run on the console.
Some background info: At the Summer Games Festival, the CDPR booth let journalists, creators, and other attendees choose which version of the game they wanted to play. You can choose PC, Xbox Series, or PS5. Given the myriad issues (legal and performance issues) that the base game encountered on the PlayStation console at launch, I chose to demo the game on Sony’s machine. I’m really glad I did.
From the beginning of the demo – where V and their new friend Songbird watch the presidential plane drop from the sky and crash into the tragic, walled-off Dogtown – you can see the work the studio put into making this video of the console friendly. As Alex has rightly pointed out, the game’s various patches and updates have made it one of the best console RPGs of this generation, but now – with all the bells and whistles added by Phantom Freedom – it’s Looks and feels better.
For demo purposes, you can choose from ninja builds that prioritize fast movement, snap shootouts, and sprinting. Because I want to experience true Edgerunner fantasy, and that’s what VI’s aim for, and let me tell you…it feels great on the mat. The way you shoot in Phantom Liberty has been massively overhauled, so now it actually feels more like a proper first-person cover shooter than some afterthought. The aiming sights and sudden headshots reminded me of Bulletstorm, of all things – the devs at my station agreed on that.
Tactile feedback and resistance on the trigger makes shooting feel as mechanical as possible, and hot-swapping an assault rifle to a pis tol results in precise changes in recoil and impact, as you’d expect. Shooting in Cyberpunk 2077 will never feel like Destiny, but what happens in Phantom Freedom is a marked improvement over what happened when the game launched.
But why would you shoot when you can rip and rip? Doom it’s not, but it feels great that you can do rhythmic, rampant cuts and dice to that wonderful club backing track. New skills have been added to your Mantis blades, a new skill tree allows for more utility when moving around the battlefield, and cyberwear – the armor that gives you – has been added to allow you to choose to be more aggressive and enter the battlefield as you enemies’ faces before shrinking them down to a certain size.
You might not even need to rely on replenishable shields, though; players with good timing will be able to parry bullets—yes, bullets! – if they stack enough points to the correct ninja style trait. My pre-made Ninja V went into a very satisfying mid-air dash mode, landing on hired mobs, slicing them open, deflecting bullets back into another mob’s head, becoming invisible, and repeating the whole grim ballet all over again Before reaching the vantage point.
When the DLC releases, you’ll be happy to know that many of these system-side changes will apply to the entire game – not just the parts for which you’ll pay extra. I think that’s the real beauty of Phantom Liberty; it re-builds the game as Cyberpunk 2077 2.0, and makes a really strong argument for you booting up the game and starting another save file.
But regardless of how I, and other creators who have had the chance to play it, the fact that CD Projekt Red is here to show Phantom Freedom on PS5 is an utterly brilliant shot. It shows that the developers aren’t afraid of DLC’s popularity on consoles, it shows that the game has a truly playable, expandable build, and it shows that the studio is very proud of it — proud enough that people In the summer at least, Games Fest and Xbox FanFest will be played.
Given that the studio doesn’t even allow reviewers to play the console version before reviewing it, the kind of transparency we’re seeing ahead of Phantom Liberty’s release feels like a sea change for CD Projekt Red: eager to shake it off from a botched base game launch The reputation it has earned, its wit and technology with Phantom Liberty may indicate what the developers have up their sleeves in the future as we enter a new age of wizards, and what happens next once the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC is out now.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The Phantom Liberty will be available on September 26 for £24.99.