When I first wrote my impressions of Cyberpunk 2077, I experienced the game on a base PS4. While my time with the game wasn’t as bad as the internet made it out to be (never saw a T-pose, and never had a hard crash), my game experience definitely felt empty and lacking. I could speed through the city without ever hitting a car because, well, there was no other cars on the road really. Now, three years later, the game is launching update 2.0, a free patch that coincides with the release of Phantom Liberty, the paid expansion pack featuring Idris Elba on current-gen consoles and PC (so PS4 and Xbox One are not part of this update). So I installed the update on my PS5 to see if it was worth all the fuss. Here’s my thoughts after roughly twelve hours of play with a new save file. As a note, the experience is my own, photos I’ve scrubbed from the internet as I don’t have anything to capture.

CD Projekt Red advises that players should start a new save file when playing 2.0 and/or Phantom Liberty, as the new mechanics and functions should not only be experienced from the start but may clash with later game save files. So that’s what I did, opting for a Street Kid as opposed to the Corpo I played originally. Once I got passed the opening two missions, I was able to really see this new version of Night City en route to Victor, the Ripperdoc and let me just say that this game looks amazing. In fact, it looks breathtaking, if you catch my drift.

I’m playing with ray tracing turned on, so the city and its many neons reflect off concrete, metal and puddles. Unlike my PS4 experience, the square outside V’s apartment is actually packed with pedestrians and cars on the street, giving a lived-in feeling to a city that already felt well-designed. In short, it’s one of the best-looking games I’ve seen now. The world also seems more responsive, with NPCs running out of the way of my terrible driving skills for example or seeking over should a shootout start on the streets, as opposed to crouching on the spot where they stopped walking.

Gameplay Tweaks

There are some new tweaks made to gameplay that completely change the flow of gameplay. One is that the stamina meter now reacts to the number of shots or melee attacks given. The more you attack, the less accurate you become, forcing you to be more deliberate and punish those who spray. Armour is also no longer attached to your clothing, as it’s governed by the cyberware mechanic now. So clothing is largely cosmetic, save for a few items. The number of cyberware you can have at any given time now is dictated by your capacity, which grows when you level up. But you can also unlock certain perks to boost the cyberware capacity, bringing you one step closer to becoming David from the Edgerunners anime (minus the mental breakdown). I also noticed enemy AI was better and would try to hack me way more than before, creating cat-and-mouse encounters.

Twisted Metal

There’s car combat now! In the original build, vehicular combat was limited to on-rail set pieces, where you’d lose control of the car and shoot out the passenger window. Those days are gone, as you can now drive and shoot at the same time. You can even get weaponized vehicles too a-la James Bond. The driving also feels noticeably much more fun, with the handling of vehicles being much closer now to that found in Grand Theft Auto V. Combine that with the PS5’s controller and driving feels so much better now.

Skill Tree

This is perhaps the biggest change in 2.0. Originally, the skill tree was a slew of buffs with a few cool skills scattered among the tree itself. It felt decidedly lacking to say the least and kind of convoluted, with two trees under each related attribute, as seen in the first photo below. But now the skills feel much more rewarding from the get-go. One of the early ones allows for health regeneration based on the number of enemies in your location while another allows you to deflect bullets with your blades. Many of these have multiple tiers, such as being able to dash dodge further on the second level and you’re very much encouraged to make hybrid builds. I’m a netrunning ninja who uses pistols for example, running around the field, triggering my health multipliers while dodging, dashing and deflecting bullets, pausing time to hack enemies. It’s wicked fun. Plus, doing specific things like headshots will unlock skills in the Headhunter tree as part of a skill progression, which will give you passive buffs in that particular category. Later in the skill tree, I can unlock a perk to use my health to pay for my hacks when my RAM is empty with a perk and when used in combination with health regeneration perks, it should make for a vicious cycle of lowering my health then trying to raise it back quickly in combat.

GTA-Styled Wanted System

The original police system in Cyberpunk 2077 also sucked ass, to say the least. You’d commit a crime and some random drones or NPC cops would spawn behind you and would be a minor nuisance and then they’d despawn, making you wonder what the point was. Now, the police behave much more like they do in Grand Theft Auto. Cops constantly patrol the city on foot and in cars and dip a toe out of line and you’ll get a one-star indicator for your offense. Cops will then chase you down, with the only way to lose the cops is to lose the line of sight and make an escape. The longer you engage the cops, the more stars you accrue and more trouble you’ll face, including roadblocks, until the fifth star is triggered. It’s here where MaxTac comes out, highly armoured police with their own cyberware. You will not survive, at least not early on.

I did have a few minors bugs while playing the new patch. Jackie walked through his car when making his way to the Maelstrom gang hideout and my own car would clip through geometry a few times. When in the garbage dump, some of the textures would load incorrectly, creating weird shapes and some janky animations when the objects would get moved via the animation. But that’s all I experienced, no crashes, no T-poses, no missing faces, etc. It fell into what I’d say are acceptable bugs and glitches, nothing game-breaking.

These aren’t all the updates, some of them are minor detail stuff and if you want a full breakdown, best to check out the patch notes.

Recommendation

So, would I recommend you pick up Cyberpunk 2077 again? I really would! In fact, I’m of mind to pick up Phantom Liberty now and see what else is being offered in Night City. The original game should not have launched in the state it did, but much like No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk has experienced a major comeback and is well worth the time now. If you own it, reinstall it and give it a go. But don’t dismiss it right away, the new gameplay will require a few level-ups in order to get the needed skills unlocked and from there, the game really opens up. You’ll start to notice a change probably once you’ve paired up with Keanu Reeve’s Johnny Silverhand. So keep with it, I think it’s a blast now and looks stunning.