Cyberpunk 2077

This review is about the game as it stands on PC, where the base game has been running on the free 2.x update line since 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion sits on top of it.

One sheet, several bills arriving at once

Progress in Cyberpunk 2077 is not a single track you climb. It is a set of separate budgets that all pull on the same character, and the free 2.0 update rebuilt most of them in one go. The studio's own summary calls it a complete perk tree overhaul: fewer perks per tree, each of them meant to change how you play rather than nudge a percentage, with tree progression unlocking abilities. The examples it gives are Overclock for netrunners, Bolt shots for Tech weapons, and Adrenaline Rush for Body-focused builds.

Five skills sit alongside the perks, and they are worth understanding before you spend anything. They are named Headhunter, Netrunner, Shinobi, Solo and Engineer, and the studio notes a detail that catches people out: they are not restricted by the level of the attribute they sound like they belong to. Each one unlocks a passive buff every five levels and levels up to a maximum of 60. If your perks were spent before 2.0 landed, they were refunded, and you can now refund any individual perk for free rather than resetting a whole tree. Attributes get a single reset and then that door closes.

Cyberware is the armour now

The biggest structural change in 2.0 is where your protection comes from. Armour moved onto cyberware, which left clothing mostly cosmetic: clothing items lost their mod slots and only some of them carry bonuses. What limits you instead is Cyberware Capacity, which is a budget rather than a slot count. It grows with your level and is hard-capped at 450, so the question is always what you can afford to keep installed. Implants are attuned to specific attributes, so the higher the matching attribute, the stronger the stat bonus, and some cyberware slots only open once you have the perk that unlocks them.

That turns the ripperdoc into a second progression board, separate from levelling. There are new implant types to buy, upgrades you perform on the install screen, and a side quest that introduces the new system if you load a save from before the overhaul. If you have played earlier versions, the useful habit to unlearn is treating clothes as gear. Here they are the picture, and the metal is the stat line.

Netrunning runs on two currencies

Quickhacks have always cost RAM, and 2.0 rebalanced those costs and upload times and changed what several hacks do. It also added a mode called Overclock, which lets you upload a quickhack by spending health when you do not have the RAM for it, and it made queueing several quickhacks on one target possible. Breach Protocol was removed as something you do to enemies, which narrows the opening move of a netrunner fight.

Overclock is worth knowing exactly before you build around it. It sits in the Intelligence tree at 15 Intelligence behind the Embedded Exploit perk, and it runs on a timer: for fourteen seconds you can upload quickhacks you cannot afford, with every point of RAM beyond what you currently have available paid for in health, followed by a thirty second cooldown. Netrunner perks stretch that window and cut the health cost, so a heavily invested build can lean on the overdraft for a whole fight. Nothing about it asks you to stand in melee.

The systems around the fights changed too

Enemies now scale to your level instead of to the district you are standing in. The studio's own note says enemy difficulty is no longer tied to where you are on the map, and that the game was rebalanced to raise the challenge at the higher difficulty settings, which makes your build the thing you are actually testing. Health items and grenades became limited charges that recharge over time rather than consumables you stockpile. Stamina drains when you fire a ranged weapon or swing a melee one, and no longer drains for sprinting, sliding or jumping.

Crafting and upgrading now need one type of component instead of several, though components still come in five tiers, and the old rarity ladder gave way to item tiers that run to Tier 5, with Tier 5+ and Tier 5++ above it as upgrade steps. Upgrading is the narrow part: apart from cyberware, only Iconic weapons can be pushed higher, and each upgrade takes them up a tier. Vehicles became a combat layer: pistols, submachine guns and health items from the driver's seat, mounted weapons on some cars, melee from motorcycles, tyres you can shoot out, and perks that unlock vehicle tricks. The police got a wanted level with escalating responses.

What you are buying, and on what

Every change on that list is free content the studio shipped to the base game rather than gating behind the expansion. Phantom Liberty is the paid addition, sold as downloadable content for the base game: a spy-thriller story set in the Dogtown district, with its own Relic perk progression layered on top of the character you already have. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is the bundle worth knowing about, pairing the base game, the 2.0 update, the free downloadable content and the expansion in one purchase.

On PC the requirement went up with 2.0, and the store listing is explicit that an SSD is expected: a 64-bit Windows 10 system, 12GB of RAM, 70GB of storage and an SSD on the minimum side, with 16GB on the recommended side. There is a macOS build with its own requirements. The game is single-player, the listing carries adjustable difficulty, full controller support and Family Sharing, and the studio kept a pre-2.0 branch available on Steam for people who want the older version.

Should you play it

Yes, if the appeal of an RPG is deciding what kind of thing your character is and then living with it. The 2.0 overhaul made the sheet carry more weight: cyberware capacity is a budget you can feel, the perk trees hand out abilities rather than percentages, and the skills are not gated behind the attribute they sound like they belong to.

Skip it if you want the fighting to be the whole conversation and the menus to be a formality, because the menus are where a lot of this game now lives. Skip it too if you are packing a mechanical drive, since the listing stops pretending otherwise.