Forgive me for letting you down.

Phantom Liberty just can’t keep the 2077 heat up, which is all the more surprising when you consider that it’s an expansion to an already (allegedly) finished game, and not at all held back by being a wholly original work. Phantom Liberty’s linear gameplay is pushed forward by boring writing, and is then packed into a tiny slice of Night City that’s remarkably dense and remarkably shallow. Never has this world felt so artificial, barring back when the base game ran so poorly that Sony pulled it from their storefronts. Speaking of, this is the perfect place for your thirty dollars to go if you’ve missed those days of poor performance; even on a brand-new rig, Dogtown still chugs when trying to draw rays. Maybe this is like Crysis and they designed this tiny piece of Pacifica for a computer that’ll exist in the future.

Anyone who’s played tabletop games for long enough knows the dangers of letting a campaign go on for too long. Unless the DM has made some pretty solid plans — and assuming that the players haven’t gone too far off of the rails — properly handling escalation tends to be difficult. Ramp up the stakes too slowly, and your players will get bored; ramp them up too quickly, and you’ll have nowhere left to go. 2077 ends with an assault on Arasaka Tower, ensuring that V gets to be remembered as one of Night City’s legends. As Silverhand before them, as Blackhand before them, as Spider Murphy before them, as Rogue before them; V leads a charge against one of the deadliest corps in the setting to defeat Adam Smasher, destroy Mikoshi (unless you pick the obvious bad ending), and separate their mind from Johnny’s once and for all. It’s a strong ending, giving you an unequivocal victory in a world where you aren’t meant to get those. Phantom Liberty seems to assume (and reasonably for a $30 expansion) that you’ve seen this ending before. As such, it needs to escalate. It’s placed right in the middle of V’s story, but it needs to wow returning players who have seen everything that the original game built up to, and it does this by turning into a cartoon.

V gets contacted via their Relic by the world’s greatest netrunner, who’s currently working for the New United States of America. She informs you that she’s onboard the Space Force One alongside the president of the country, they’re going to crash, and they need your help. V swoops in, rescues the president of the NUSA, agrees to be a spy for the government, and then goes on little James Bond adventures with Idris Elba for the promise of a cure. The netrunner, Songbird, is also so fucking good at what she does that she’s managed to harness the power of the Blackwall. There’s a part at the end of her path where V jacks into her and gets to use the Blackwall powers for themselves, letting you click your fire button to UNLEASH BLACKWALL and glitch an entire army of secret service supersoldiers to death. Reed’s (Idris Elba’s) path features you directly taking on MAXTAC in order to pull Songbird out of their grasp. All of this happens immediately after V deals with the Voodoo Boys in Act 2. V goes from some snotnose merc who’s still on the come-up to an NUSA super spy, capable of harnessing the Blackwall like a magic spell and slaughtering a full squad of MAXTAC soldiers before they’ve even heard the name “Anders Hellman”. It’s far too much, far too quickly. V is the strongest fucking person who has ever lived and it isn't close. It’s silly.

Not helping matters is how synthetic this setting is, made all the worse by the story structure. Most of what you’ll be doing in Dogtown amounts to little more than going to a place and then going back. You might even get to kill someone if you’re really lucky, but it’s not something you should expect to be doing much of. It’s more like a little treat. A lot of these meetings could have been holocalls. You'll drive to Alex's bar, drive to Mr. Hands's hotel, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to an airdrop, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a Voodoo Boys hideout, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a radio tower, drive back to Alex's bar. Dogtown itself is mercifully small, so these to-and-fro drives don't take especially long, but they serve only to illustrate how fake this world really is; the same NPCs will be shaken down by the same goons every time you pass by the same street corners, likely in pursuit of one of the same airdrops that's landed in the same spot to be picked up by the same set of guards. This was a problem in the base game, but nowhere near to this extent; Dogtown being so tiny and so dense reveals only that these characters are like actors in a play. They de-materialize the second they're no longer needed. Night City being fucking massive — despite having very little to do within it — at the very least provided some level of obfuscation for how surface level the NPC routines and placements were. Even then, there were some NPCs that would stand around in the same spots and actually have dialog that advanced as you progressed through the story. I remember there being a corrupt cop who always talked to the same two Tyger Claws on a street corner in Kabuki, and he would tell them about different schemes he had cooked up whenever you drove past. Not so in Dogtown. Everyone gets one line, one routine, one action, and they do it over and over again in the hopes that you won't be paying attention long enough to see them repeat themselves.

Regardless, it's the missions themselves that show just how far CDPR's level design chops have slipped. These are some of the most aggressively linear levels I've seen in any modern game, and they're easily on par with the worst Call of Duty campaigns. Most offensive of the lot is You Know My Name, where V is tasked with infiltrating a cocktail party. The game has a very clear idea of how it wants this to go — you enter through the sewers, silently take out the few guards they have posted, snipe everyone blocking Reed's path, schmooze your way through the party, find Songbird, download personality profiles of two hackers hired by Kurt Hansen, and then get out. The problem with this, to go back to the DM analogy, lies in how on-rails this entire mission is. There is so little room for player expression, and taking it on any other way feels like you're going off-script in a way that the game isn't equipped to handle. The building you're breaking into has some of the tightest security in all of Dogtown, patrolled by dozens upon dozens of BARGHEST guards, and V is reminded over and over again how key it is to remain stealthy. If you go guns blazing, and get caught at every single opportunity provided to you, the only thing that actually changes is whether or not Reed gets a black eye when you're escorted out of the building at the end. Something like thirty guards all get mowed down by you and your superspy friend who doesn't understand how cover works when you're guiding him around, and nobody bats an eye. You just walk about, do exactly what the game tells you to, and your actions are ignored if you try to do anything else. Even some of the most basic gigs in the base game offered more player expression than this. Being locked in place on a stationary sniper rifle and telling an NPC where to go for ten minutes is not what I play Cyberpunk 2077 for.

For as high as the stakes are, this is a remarkably boring narrative. Setting aside the bog-standard secret agent man schlock — which was already done and better in the base game — these might be some of the most same-y characters I've seen in a long time. Between Reed, Myers, Songbird, and Alex, every single one of them has the base, singular trait of "competent", and all later develop the secondary trait of "backstabber". Songbird backstabs Myers who backstabs V who backstabs Reed who backstabbed Alex who backstabs V and Songbird who backstabs V. They go through all of this with the excitement and fervor of Sam and Ralph clocking in. They're fucking bored by the entire narrative. Everyone seems like they'd rather just go home and be done with it. Johnny isn't even allowed to be wrong about anything anymore; he's been reduced to a voice in your head who mugs the camera and glibly recaps everything that happened every ten minutes to make sure that you're still paying attention. Base game Johnny had a lot of moments where he was an abject moron too blinded by his ego to see obvious answers, but none of that exists here. It doesn't even make sense in the timeline: he can give you that whole teary speech about how Songbird must have just wanted her freedom more than he did and that's why she got a happy ending instead of him, and then slip right back into his dipshit asshole persona the second you get back to base game. Again, CDPR is writing Johnny under the assumption that you've already seen him go through his character arc, but that doesn't work when you willingly set the events of your follow-up story before the point where his arc actually happens.

All of this just makes me wonder if CDPR ever actually had a clue what they were doing with Cyberpunk, or if it was just luck and a lot of outside consulting that got them where they are. V being able to take on MAXTAC in a 2v4 and coming out not just alive but victorious is so fucking stupid that it actually annoys me. I know I'm being a lore freak, but it's ridiculous. V may as well have recruited Bugs Bunny for the mission. There's no sense in pretending as though this is still a fairly normal story operating within the bounds of reality when you're so willing to break the hard rules of your own setting so easily. This goes double for the idea of harnessing the Blackwall and using it like a Bioshock plasmid. I'd call it pure fanfiction, but most fanfiction coming out these days has more restraint. Beating Adam Smasher was similarly pretty out there in the base game, but it at least had some narrative heft; two Night City legends taking down the last of the old guard, and it was one of the last things V ever did. You can canonically wipe a MAXTAC squad or shoot the Blackwall out of your fingers in this and the game just keeps on going as if V isn't a fucking god. Again, this is placed chronologically right after V deals with the Voodoo Boys, and there's still a lot of base game left after that. How the fuck are the Tyger Claws meant to be considered a serious threat after this? The Raffens? Kang Tao? Arasaka? You can't set your character to a level of strength and ability this fucking high and then bring the stakes back down afterwards. At least Reed's route has the good grace to offer ending your playthrough; finish the expansion by sending Songbird into space and you're dropped right back into Night City to go and get yourself a different ending.

Phantom Liberty is a massive disappointment. The opening section — while roughly about as linear as the game means to go on — at least manages to promise some interesting developments that ultimately never come. I think I'd like to stop offering so many chances to this studio, now. Thank goodness CDPR is taking a breaking from the Cyberpunk universe, and is instead shifting gears to beat some more life out of The Witcher horse. There is still supposed to be a sequel game coming out at some point in the future; if this is what we can expect moving forward, count me out.

They yassified Mr. Hands.