Cyberpunk 2077 Review: Night City's Cinematic Comeback Story

A Comeback Story As Good As The Game

Let us get the elephant out of the room first. Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 as one of the most infamous disasters in gaming history. Broken on last-gen consoles, drowning in bugs, refunded by Sony — the whole saga. If you wrote it off back then, nobody at Dadnology would blame you. We nearly did too.

But here is the thing about being a busy dad: you do not have time to follow patch notes for three years. You just want to know whether the game is good now. So here is the verdict up front. Cyberpunk 2077 in 2026 — fully patched, rebuilt by the 2.0 overhaul, and crowned by the Phantom Liberty expansion — is a genuinely brilliant game. It is one of the most cinematic experiences you can have with a controller in your hands.

That is the standout achievement, and it is worth sitting with. This is technically an open-world RPG, a genre famous for sprawling, baggy, choose-your-own-pacing storytelling. Cyberpunk 2077 somehow delivers an open world and a story with the tension, framing, and emotional payoff of a tight blockbuster film. Most open worlds feel like a theme park you wander. This one feels like a movie you are starring in.

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Welcome to Night City

Before we talk story, we have to talk about the place. Night City is, without exaggeration, one of the densest and most convincing virtual cities ever built.

This is not a city that exists as a backdrop. It exists as a character. Towering megabuildings stacked like vertical slums. Neon advertising bleeding across rain-slicked streets. Food stalls hissing in alleys while corporate towers glitter overhead, indifferent to the people below. Every district has its own personality — the corporate gloss of the City Center, the gang-ruled decay of Pacifica, the faded glamour of Japantown.

What makes it work is the layering. You can ride an elevator up forty floors and look out over the whole sprawl. You can dive into a back-alley ripperdoc clinic to get new cybernetic implants. You can sit in a car at a noodle bar and just watch the world go by. It is the kind of place that rewards the dad who only gets an hour at a time — there is always something to look at, even when you are too tired to push the main quest forward.

The world has a point of view, too. Cyberpunk 2077 is genuinely about something: a society where corporations have replaced governments, where your body is a product to be upgraded or repossessed, where humanity is something you can lose one chrome implant at a time. It is grim, it is stylish, and it never lets the spectacle drown the message. That is rare.

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V, Johnny, and a Story That Earns Its Runtime

The plot is where Cyberpunk 2077 transforms from a great-looking world into something special.

You play V, a mercenary on the rise in Night City who, through a job gone catastrophically wrong, ends up with a dead rockstar-terrorist’s personality chip wired into their brain. That rockstar is Johnny Silverhand — played by Keanu Reeves, and far better written than that casting stunt deserved to be. Johnny is a ghost in V’s head, slowly overwriting them. The story becomes a race against your own dissolving identity.

It is a brilliant setup because it gives the whole game a clock. V is dying. Every side quest, every relationship, every flashy implant exists under the shadow of running out of time — which, frankly, is the most relatable theme a dad game has ever offered. The relationship between V and Johnny carries the entire narrative, starting hostile and slowly turning into something complicated and genuinely moving.

The mission design is where the cinematic quality really shows. The big set-piece quests are staged like film sequences — the heists, the betrayals, the quiet conversations on a rooftop at dawn. CD Projekt Red learned everything from The Witcher 3 about side quests that are actually stories, and they apply it here. Even minor gigs frequently land an emotional punch you did not see coming.

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Phantom Liberty: The Peak

If the base game is the comeback, Phantom Liberty is the victory lap. Released in 2023, this expansion is genuinely some of the best work CD Projekt Red has ever shipped.

It pivots the tone from cyberpunk crime saga to tense espionage thriller. You are dragged into a conspiracy involving the President of the New United States, a rogue netrunner, and a brilliant, morally grey spy named Solomon Reed (played by Idris Elba — again, casting that earns its keep). The new Dogtown district is a war-torn enclave that feels distinct from the rest of Night City, and the central questline features choices with consequences that genuinely sting.

For our money, Phantom Liberty is where Cyberpunk 2077 fully delivers on the promise it made back in 2020. If you only have the energy to remember one reason this game crawled back from the dead, it is this expansion. The Ultimate Edition includes it, which is exactly why that is the version we point dads toward.

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The 2.0 Overhaul and the Build Problem (The Reason It Is a 9, Not a 10)

Here is where we get to the one honest reservation, and it is a strange one — Cyberpunk 2077 is, if anything, too generous.

The 2.0 update completely rebuilt the game’s progression, skill trees, and combat. The result is a system with genuine depth. You can play V as a stealthy Netrunner, hacking enemies’ brains and frying their nervous systems from across a room without firing a shot. You can go full Solo, a bullet-sponge gunfighter who kicks down doors and wins with raw firepower. You can build a Techie, leaning on gadgets, tech weapons that shoot through walls, and crafted gear. There are blade-focused builds, netrunner-gunslinger hybrids, the lot.

And every one of them genuinely changes how the game plays. A Netrunner playthrough and a Solo playthrough feel like two different games sharing a city.

This is the luxury problem. Cyberpunk 2077 is so rich with viable, distinct builds that it practically demands multiple playthroughs to appreciate fully. And that is the one thing most dads simply do not have. A 100-hour game you play once is already a months-long commitment when you are squeezing it into the gap between bedtime and your own collapse. Playing it three times to see every build? That is a beautiful idea for someone with a different life.

So this is not a flaw in the game — it is a flaw in our calendar. But it is the honest reason we land on a 9 rather than a perfect 10. A 10 in our book is a game perfectly matched to the time you can give it. Cyberpunk 2077 offers more than one lifetime of content, and gently reminds you how little time you actually have. That is both its triumph and its one tiny tragedy for the time-poor.

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A First-Person Game in a Third-Person Lineup

A note for regular readers of this series. Cyberpunk 2077 is the odd one out here, because it is played almost entirely in first-person. You only drop to third-person for driving and the occasional framing shot. In a lineup built around third-person, story-driven action, that is a deliberate exception.

We thought hard about it. But the truth is that the first-person view is part of why Night City lands so hard. Being inside V’s eyes, looking up at those megatowers, watching a ripperdoc bolt new chrome into your arm in clinical close-up — it is uncomfortably intimate in a way a camera-behind-the-shoulder view would dilute. The perspective serves the immersion, and the writing earns the seat. It belongs here on the strength of its story, full stop.

It is worth flagging if you are someone who gets motion sickness in first-person games — go in with that expectation. But for most players the view is a feature, not a compromise.

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Presentation: Built for the Best Screen You Own

On modern hardware, Cyberpunk 2077 is a showcase. The lighting — especially with ray tracing enabled on a capable machine — turns Night City’s neon into something genuinely beautiful. Rain pooling on the streets reflecting a hundred signs. Sunsets bleeding orange over the smog. Interiors lit like a noir film.

The audio deserves equal billing. The soundtrack swings from synth-heavy menace to mournful guitar, and the in-world radio stations are a genre tour worth listening to on their own. Crucially for the late-night dad, the spatial audio is excellent — a good headset puts you inside the city and, just as importantly, keeps the gunfire and the bass out of the bedroom down the hall.

This is one of those rare games that genuinely rewards the best display and audio setup you can give it. If you have an OLED and a decent headset gathering dust, this is the game to dust them off for.

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The Dad Angle — When and How to Play It

Let us be clear about what this game is. Cyberpunk 2077 is rated M for Mature and it earns every letter — intense violence, blood, nudity, strong language, and a casual relationship with drug use that runs through the whole setting. This is emphatically not a game to have running while a five-year-old wanders in for a glass of water. This is a headphones-on, kids-asleep, door-closed kind of game.

But it is a fantastic one for that slot. The cinematic pacing means a single late-night session can deliver a complete, satisfying story beat — a heist, a heartbreak, a turn you did not see coming — without demanding you remember a tangle of systems from a week ago. The main story is a relatively lean 25 to 30 hours, which is merciful by RPG standards. You can actually finish this one.

Our honest recommendation: buy the Ultimate Edition, build a Solo or Netrunner V (the two most beginner-friendly), play the main story at a relaxed pace, fold Phantom Liberty in around the midpoint, and resist the urge to chase every single side gig unless one grabs you. Treat it as a great film you are watching one act at a time. Do that, and Cyberpunk 2077 delivers one of the best stories in the medium, on a schedule a dad can actually keep.

And if, somewhere down the line, you find yourself wanting to start over as a katana-wielding netrunner just to see how different it feels — well, that is the 9-out-of-10 problem talking. It is a good problem to have.

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FAQ

Is Cyberpunk 2077 worth playing in 2026?

Yes. After years of patches, the 2.0 overhaul, and the Phantom Liberty expansion, the game is now stable, deep, and one of the most cinematic open-world RPGs available. It is a completely different experience from the broken 2020 launch.

Do I need to play Cyberpunk 2077 before Phantom Liberty?

Phantom Liberty is an expansion that slots into the main game, so you need the base game to play it. The best route is to buy the Ultimate Edition, which bundles everything, and weave Phantom Liberty into your main playthrough partway through.

Is Cyberpunk 2077 first-person or third-person?

It is played almost entirely in first-person, with third-person used only for driving and cutscene framing. It is the rare first-person entry in our story-driven action lineup, but the writing and Night City earn it a place.

How long does Cyberpunk 2077 take to finish?

The main story runs roughly 25 to 30 hours. With side quests and the Phantom Liberty expansion you are looking at 60 to 90 hours, and the build variety means a second playthrough plays very differently.

Is Cyberpunk 2077 a kids game?

No. It is rated M for Mature for intense violence, blood, nudity, strong language, and drug use. This is a late-night game to play after the kids are asleep, not a family co-op title.