by Preston Rizzo
Recently, I finally got my motivation to play Cyberpunk 2077 back after a very long hiatus. I haven’t played the game since April of last year, burning out from being indecisive about how I wanted to build my character. However, watching a friend play got me back into the mood for it and to go back to my old character and finally go through the DLC.
I mostly managed to avoid spoilers about the DLC; I knew a little bit about some unique weapons you can get and a few broad strokes for the story but not much else. Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time with it. I technically haven’t finished the story completely yet as I have a final conversation with Idris Elba’s character, Solomon Reed, to close things out, but I’ve finished the majority of both the side content and the story.
I wouldn’t call the story disappointing, although it didn’t quite go how I imagined it would. The biggest surprise to me was how little time we spend with President Rosalind Myers. You save her as part of the first quest from an assassination but afterward, you just meet with Reed, who gets her out of the city and essentially out of the story as a character until the end.
After this, you spend the story with Reed and another former member of his squad, Alex. Your goal is to figure out what happened to the hacker who contacted you in the first place and promised a cure to the condition killing you and Songbird. She’s another character who surprised me because I thought she would be present throughout the entire storyline so we could build a connection with her. Instead, you barely see or hear from her for hours.
You learn during the search for her that she’s essentially a ticking time bomb due to messing with AIs from beyond the Blackwall, an AI built to stop other ill-intentioned AIs infesting the net from being able to interact with the world on the president’s orders, and that Kurt Hansen, the leader of the DLCs new zone, Dogtown, knows all about this and could if he so chooses completely destroy the N.U.S.A as it exists by leaking this information.
I liked this story more than the main game. It’s very much a spy movie type of plot and has way bigger implications for the world compared to what is a mostly personal story in main game about trying to survive. The only thing that didn’t sell me is the characters; maybe it’s just a shift in my tastes or bitterness toward the game from its bad launch, but I never really cared for any of the characters in the game. Whether it’s a friend who they want you to care about within an hour, or all the frankly shallow romance options, I just shrug at it all.
The biggest example of this to me is the choice near the end to either help Songbird go rogue or betray her to try and take her back to the government. Even without all the much more interesting rewards being on the betrayal path, nothing about Songbirds story compelled me enough to help her after she outright tells you, “Yeah, I made a deal to crash SF1.” So, I sold her out and didn’t kill her when she asked me to at the end, and I guess I feel a little bad, but it also doesn’t matter to me unless they do a sequel with a save import.
Moving on from the main story, there’s also a new collection of side content, namely the gigs which have a lot more story to them compared to the base game. These all have some real story where you get to do more things like meeting with your client, and you get real choices like letting your client get arrested after finishing the job you were hired for. It really shows that less is more, as I remember most of these 8 missions much better than any of the 40 gigs that I did for all the other people in the main game.
In terms of gameplay, the game adds a new relic skill tree with unique perks and its own points, so you don’t lose out on any other perks. The big one from my experience was the ability to add one of the hacks you can use against enemies into the monowire weapon. This turns it from a decent damage dealer to something that can dominate your enemies and stop them from doing anything. The other skill trees are much less interesting, just more effective camouflage and weak points on enemies who can already die easily.
I do feel like I got my money’s worth out of the DLC, although the side content was so high quality and the main story so shockingly long that it’s kind of killed my energy to go back to slogging through all the other main story quests. I put those off for so long that I now have a max level character who has no real challenges left.
Overall, if you like the game already and don’t have the DLC, somehow getting it is a no-brainer with what it adds. But if you aren’t into the game already or want to check it out for the first time, you don’t really need the DLC and could probably wait to get it. While it’s good and some of the gameplay stuff it adds is neat, it isn’t necessarily worth double the price even while on sale.
