Massive improvement over the base game, loved the story, prefer Songbird's path over Reed's but all in all a solid experience with all the endings, Songbird's path felt way more satisfying even though you end up killing reed, then again Reed's path had different exciting missions, the robot encounter was pretty amazing. It's really amazing how the game still manages to make you feel bad for Songbird, even though she's narcissistic, disregarded, betrayed everyone around her for her own good. Writing really works this time around for the most part. Now with the Secret Ending "Things done changed", I liked this ending as well, felt very bittersweet, but the fact that so much changes in everyone's life in a span of just 2 years makes it seem a bit far fetched, but still it was pretty sad to see Johnny leave like that. Panam's reaction to that didn't make sense, you see in the credits that one of her friends from the badlands asks V not to call her and stuff, I don't really think it's all justified there, V was in a coma. Other than that every ending had this vibe of you've reached your destination but at what cost, and it was all pretty good.
Now with the gameplay, I feel like the police overhaul didn't do much, apart from adding max tac and a few dialogues for when you're wanted. I could still flee a 3 star cop chase withing 20 seconds if I was on foot, but I'd still take this over what they had to offer before the upgrade. Vehicle combat was cool and stuff but you don't really get anything to do with the feature when you're on the main quests. Not to mention I had random fps drops on parts of dog town even if those places looked inferior to night city. The skill tree was an improvement, you could now have different kinds of finishers and it all felt great, made the gameplay way more engaging, but the relic skill tree was underwhelming, you didn't have much to do with that. Other than that, I feel like it was a good decision to remove bullet spongy enemies, idk if they actually did that cuz I played the dlc with 50 street cred maxed up V. So like the enemies feel less of a chore to beat and more fun, the main story of Phantom Liberty had some really amazing enemy encounters. Don't know why but Johnny felt like a side character in this, he'd simple just pass comment on stuff, nothing really good to add about. And about bugs I faced more bugs in 2.0 than 1.6 but they weren't really immersion breaking, but I did see moments where the game could use some patching, Takemura shows up in the end credit scene, even though he was dead in my playthrough. Pretty solid experience even better than the main game might I say. And yeah the soundtrack was marvelous.
Now with the gameplay, I feel like the police overhaul didn't do much, apart from adding max tac and a few dialogues for when you're wanted. I could still flee a 3 star cop chase withing 20 seconds if I was on foot, but I'd still take this over what they had to offer before the upgrade. Vehicle combat was cool and stuff but you don't really get anything to do with the feature when you're on the main quests. Not to mention I had random fps drops on parts of dog town even if those places looked inferior to night city. The skill tree was an improvement, you could now have different kinds of finishers and it all felt great, made the gameplay way more engaging, but the relic skill tree was underwhelming, you didn't have much to do with that. Other than that, I feel like it was a good decision to remove bullet spongy enemies, idk if they actually did that cuz I played the dlc with 50 street cred maxed up V. So like the enemies feel less of a chore to beat and more fun, the main story of Phantom Liberty had some really amazing enemy encounters. Don't know why but Johnny felt like a side character in this, he'd simple just pass comment on stuff, nothing really good to add about. And about bugs I faced more bugs in 2.0 than 1.6 but they weren't really immersion breaking, but I did see moments where the game could use some patching, Takemura shows up in the end credit scene, even though he was dead in my playthrough. Pretty solid experience even better than the main game might I say. And yeah the soundtrack was marvelous.