Cyberpunk 2077 Review: Night City Is Worth Living In
I've restarted this Cyberpunk 2077review three times, and each attempt ended with me back in Night City in place of a text file. That is the most useful thing I can tell you about how Cyberpunk 2077 on PS5 plays now. The game I keep loading has a different combat system, a different progression system, and a whole extra district compared to the launch build.
I came to it late, after a friend told me the patches had landed, and I've dipped in and out ever since. I'm no completionist, and I have still seen every district, every fixer's gig board, and enough of Dogtown to have opinions about its militia.
Below, you'll find what holds up for me, what still annoys me, and who should press buy.
Cyberpunk 2077 Review Summary
Night City remains the most convincing open world I've driven through, and the NCART metro made it a place I look at properly.
Update 2.0 rebuilt perks, cyberware and the police system, and that's what took the game from interesting to great.
Phantom Liberty is the strongest writing CD Projekt Red has put out, with Dogtown, Solomon Reed and an ending the base game lacks.
The PS5 version has been native since February 2022, and the PlayStation 5 Pro update added a Ray Tracing Pro Mode on top.
Night City Has No Rival As A Place To Drive Through
First of all, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best open-world games. Most open worlds are a map with things on it. Night City is a place with a map attached, and the difference shows up in the first ten minutes behind a wheel. Pacifica is a resort district investors abandoned mid-build once the Unification War spooked them, and its towers are still unfinished shells. Watson packs its black market into narrow alleys and covered stalls, and I can tell which district I'm in from a single screenshot.
Vertical layering sells it. Streets run under elevated roads, megabuilding balconies hang over all of it, and Update 2.1 threaded an NCART network of 19 stations on five lines through the middle. Riding the metro in place of fast travel was the best thing I did for my second playthrough. The Radioport lets a station follow me off the bike and onto the platform.
Driving carries a lot of the mood on its own. Bikes lean properly, heavy cars understeer the way heavy cars should, and Update 2.3 added an AutoDrive option that hands the wheel over so I can watch the city go past. Calling a Delamain cab does the same job with more style once you've finished Don't Lose Your Mind.
The 2.0 Build System Is Why I Keep Rolling New Characters
Update 2.0rewrote how a character works, and it's the reason this Cyberpunk 2077 review lands where it does. Perk trees got shorter and heavier, so a point changes a behaviour where it used to add a couple of percent to a stat. Cyberware capacity caps how much you can bolt on, forcing a real choice between the deck, the legs and the arms. Loot scales to your level, and armor comes from cyberware.
My netrunner run and my Sandevistan run feel like two different games sharing a city. As a netrunner I sit on a rooftop, breach a camera, walk a contagion through a squad and never fire a shot. With a Sandevistan I go through the front door, slow time down, and put a shotgun under three chins before anyone turns around. Both builds fall apart against the wrong enemies, which is what I want from an RPG.
Police work has had the biggest turnaround here. Wanted stars escalate properly, patrol cars stay on you until you break line of sight, and MaxTac drops in once you've gone too far. Vehicle combat turns a chase into a real fight.
Clothing is the one thing I'd hand back. Since armor moved to cyberware, almost every jacket in Night City is a cosmetic, so I dress V by vibe now. I like the wardrobe system, and I still miss the version where a coat was a decision.
Phantom Liberty Is A Better Story Than The Main Game
Phantom Libertyis the best thing CD Projekt Red has written, and I say that as someone who played The Witcher 3 multiple times. It drops V into Dogtown, the walled-off chunk of Pacifica run by Colonel Hansen and his Barghest militia. A netrunner called Songbird gets V through the gate by dangling a cure for the chip killing them, in return for saving President Myers. The tone swings to a spy thriller where everyone lies to you at once, and the game earns that swing.
Solomon Reed, played by Idris Elba, is why it works. He has been an FIA sleeper agent long enough to lose track of which version of himself is real, and the writing keeps him ambiguous to the last choice. Your choices in Dogtown reach back into the main story and open up an ending the base game doesn't have, and that ending is the one I still think about.
Dogtown itself is denser than any district on the base map. Airdrops land in the open and turn into three-way firefights over one crate. Mr. Hands deals out gigs with real moral weight. Relic data terminals feed the Relic skill tree, which gave me abilities worth a rebuild.
The expansion also exposes how thin the life path opening is. Corpo, Nomad and Street Kid give you a prologue, a scattering of dialogue options and one quest each, and by Dogtown your background has stopped speaking. Phantom Liberty shows what this game does when a choice compounds, and I wanted that from hour one.
Cyberpunk 2077 Runs Clean On PS5 And Still Trips Over Its Crowds
The PS5 version has been native since the next-generation update in February 2022, and the PlayStation 5 Pro update pushed it further. Ray Tracing Mode holds 60 FPS with ray-traced shadows and reflections on car paint. Performance Mode targets 60 and climbs toward 90 on a variable refresh rate display. Ray Tracing Pro Mode adds ray-traced skylight and ambient occlusion at 40 FPS on a high refresh rate screen, and all of it leans on PSSR upscaling.
In practice I sit in Performance Mode for gigs and swap to Ray Tracing Pro Mode to walk around Japantown after rain. Wet asphalt reflecting a full block of signage is the best argument I can give you for it. Frame pacing held steady through firefights that used to make older versions wobble. Small visual bugs still turn up, mostly a jacket clipping through a chair.
Underneath the graphics sits a simulation with obvious seams. Pedestrians walk their loop, react to a gunshot with the same handful of animations, and forget it once you round the corner. Stand on a busy corner for two minutes and Night City stops being a city and starts being an expensive diorama. None of this hurts a mission, and all of it costs the game its last mile of believability.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 Worth Buying On PS5 Right Now?
Yes, and the Ultimate Edition is the version to get, since the base game without Phantom Liberty is the lesser half of the package. CD Projekt Red reported in its first-half 2026 results that the game has passed 40 million copies sold and the expansion 15 million. Those numbers climbed long after launch for one reason: the game people talk about now is not the game that shipped.
Buy it if you want a single-player RPG where your build changes the verbs you use, and where a city is a character with a personality of its own. Sit it out if you need a world simulation that survives close inspection, or if first person on foot is a dealbreaker. If you bounced off it at launch and never came back, you're the one I'd most like to drag back in.
It goes on sale often and turns up on subscription catalogues, so patience costs nothing. Grab the Ultimate Edition and give it your first evening in one sitting.
FAQs About Cyberpunk 2077 Review
Final Words
The strange part about loving this game is that the version I love came together in public, one patch at a time, in front of everyone who had written it off. That gives it a texture nothing else has. I can point at Update 2.0 and say the RPG arrived there, and at Phantom Liberty for the writing.
How you get along with it comes down to how you treat a world that looks alive and only half is. I read Night City as a painting I can walk through, which is the only way I enjoy it fully. Anyone after a simulation will keep poking the crowd and keep finding nothing behind it.
CD Projekt Red learned things about scope and honesty in public that no postmortem can teach, and the next trip to this setting gets judged against a repaired Cyberpunk 2077 rather than a broken one. Nobody outside the studio can say yet whether that lesson made it into the next game. I'd take the bet.
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