Cyberpunk 2077

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Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the rare open-world RPGs genuinely worth reviewing twice, because the game CD Projekt Red shipped on 10 December 2020 and the game it became after update 2.0 in September 2023, alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion released the same month, are close to unrecognizable from one another. This covers the current version, the one anyone buying the game today will actually play, and judged on those terms it stands as one of the strongest open-world RPGs available: a dense, genuinely reactive city built around a central story that holds up on its own merits, and character systems that finally deliver on the build experimentation the game always promised but, at launch, rarely supported in practice. The setting is Night City, a fictional metropolis on the California coast built on Mike Pondsmith's original Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG, a setting that predates the video game by more than three decades and gives Night City's corporate warfare, street gangs, and chrome-and-neon aesthetic a depth that feels inherited rather than invented from scratch. You play V, a mercenary voiced by either Gavin Drea or Cherami Leigh depending on the body and voice chosen at character creation, who ends up carrying the digitized personality of Johnny Silverhand, a dead rockerboy terrorist voiced and motion-captured by Keanu Reeves, running as a corrupted program lodged in V's own skull. Silverhand is slowly overwriting V's mind from the inside, and the entire game becomes a race to find a way out before there is no V left underneath him to save. What update 2.0 changed is almost everything structural: the perk and skill trees were rebuilt from scratch, the police and traffic systems that felt broken at launch were overhauled, vehicle combat was added, and the entire approach to character builds shifted from a system that technically worked to one that actually rewards specialization and experimentation the way the marketing always claimed it would. Phantom Liberty layered a tighter, more focused spy-thriller storyline on top of the city's open sprawl, built around a new district and a cast that holds its own against the base game's already strong central story. This is ultimately a game that needed years of sustained work to become what it was sold as in 2020, and it is worth being direct about that history rather than pretending the rocky launch never happened. But the version available today is not an apology for that launch; it is a legitimately excellent RPG on its own terms, one where Night City's density, V and Silverhand's story, and systems that finally cohere combine into one of the genre's most complete experiences, built by a studio that spent years proving it could fix what it broke rather than simply moving on from it.

The thing you'll love. Or hate.

2026-09-26 · By Game Avant

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