The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 11th
You're (finally, properly) breathtaking
This door to the RPS Advent Calendar is chrome-plated with a bright neon trim around the edges. It was all lovely and pristine looking until yesterday, when someone rudely broke out the graffiti cans and sprayed a big "Corpo 4 LIFE" tag on the front.
So ready your cyberware and fancy augments, folks. It's Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty!
Ed: Ever since Starfield came out, I've been the Cyberpunk 2077 salesman. A lot of my friends who aren't plugged into game industry happenings wrote it off after its disastrous launch and never looked back. They were, however, curious about Bethesda's spaceventure to which I said, "Don't you f*cking dare". Instead, I'd offer them an alternative to Todd's snoozefest: a renewed Night City complete with cyborgs, sadness, and a brilliant spy thriller accompaniment. All those boring skills? Reworked! All those bugs? Gone! (Mostly - it depends on how you interpret the word "gone").
Seriously, though, I've fallen more in love with Night City since the president of the US crash landed onto us in the lawless state of Dogtown. A mysterious hacker called Songbird promised us she could do something about the deadly chip in our brain, so we followed along. Then Idris Elba rocked up and may not be what he seems, or like, doesn't exactly instil our confidence in Songbird either. It's a conundrum, but one that really draws upon Cyberpunk's strengths as writing chock-full with human stories.
What's neat is how Dogtown's not some endgame location that only opens up once you've beaten the main story. You can access it fairly early in the main game, then it exists as something you can tackle in your spare time. Dogtown sits there as a mangled sunshine state if you'd like to partake in some Bond infiltrations or quiet conversations where every dialogue option has razor sharp edges.
If you're a returning fan, the expansion also hits you with a special skill tree that further complements all the tweaks to progression the free 2.0 update brought to the base game. As Graham said in his Phantom Liberty review, the new tree "makes punching people with your robot arms until they burst a viable tactic". I'd urge you to read more of his words if you want a definitive summation of how good the DLC really is.