Cyberpunk's not dead

Is Phantom Liberty the hard reboot that CD Projekt's troubled RPG needs?

You know the story, samurai. In the long years after Cyberpunk 2077 was first revealed – a period so long we wondered if the title might double as a release date – expectations for the next game from Witcher developer CD Projekt Red grew ever higher. Then, in 2020, the game finally rocked up in the kind of state you’d expect of Johnny Silverhand, the ill-tempered ghost of a rockstar implanted in your skull.

implanted in your skull. Was it as good-looking as Keanu? In its more cogent moments, sure, especially after the proliferation of plastic penises was patched out. But the game was also riddled with enough bugs to suggest it’d caught something nasty, and (on PS4 in particular) often behaved in a way best described as ‘catastrophically hungover’. Remember where you first meet Johnny: the landfill. And for a while, it looked like that’s where this long-anticipated game might be destined to stay.

Even the arrival of a native PS5 version, which ironed out a few of the technical difficulties, wasn’t enough to earn it an extra mark in our re-review. Since then, though, the game has been treated to a string of major updates that tweak and mend and add to that flawed base game. It’s helped Cyberpunk to worm its way back into our good books, something helped by the unexpectedly brilliant anime tie-in, Edgerunners. (Check it out on Netflix, if you haven’t already been booted off for password sharing – about as close as we get to being actual cyberspace hackers around these parts.)

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