Cyberpunk 2077 Review — From Gaming's Worst Launch to Its Greatest Comeback, Finished at Last
Six years, three free overhaul updates, one prestige-TV tie-in, one legendary expansion, and forty million copies later.
Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt Red's first-person open-world RPG about V, a mercenary chasing an implant that promises immortality in Night City — and it contains the strangest, most complete redemption arc in the history of video games. It launched on 10 December 2020 in such poor condition that Sony removed it from sale entirely and storefronts offered no-questions refunds. It stands today, October 2026, as a 40-million-seller on patch 2.31 with development formally wrapped: the 2.0 mechanic overhaul, the Phantom Liberty expansion (89 on Metacritic — higher than the base game itself), a Mac version, and a Nintendo Switch 2 launch edition. The sequel, codename Orion, entered pre-production in May 2025 and will not arrive before 2029 at the earliest — which makes this finished Night City, on sale this very week, the whole game for the foreseeable future.
Quick verdict:
Buy it. Buy the Ultimate Edition for Phantom Liberty. If you bounced off the 2020 launch, almost nothing you remember is still true. Sale price has hit $17.99 repeatedly through 2026 — including the window this post went up.
Cyberpunk 2077 at a glance
| Developer / Publisher | CD Projekt Red · CD Projekt |
| Released | 10 Dec 2020 (PC/PS4/XOne) · PS5/XSX native 15 Feb 2022 (update 1.5) · Ultimate Edition 5 Dec 2023 · Switch 2: 5 June 2025 (launch title) · macOS: 17 July 2025 |
| Final state | Patch 2.31 — AutoDrive, Delamain taxi questline, extra vehicles and photo mode (July 2025); development complete, team moved to sequel |
| Reception | MC: PC 86 · XSX 87 · PS5 75 · Switch 2 85 · PS4 57 (the launch-era crater) · Phantom Liberty MC 89, users 8.9 |
| Sales | 40 million (July 2026) — among the best-selling games ever made · Phantom Liberty 10M+ · $436–440M total budget, one of the most expensive games ever |
| Where to play | Steam/GOG (DRM-free)/Epic · PS4-PS5 · Xbox One/Series · Switch 2 · Mac · GeForce NOW · Steam Deck verified · Battle.net launch also slated for 2026 |
| Pricing | $59.99 / Ultimate $79.99 — recurring $17.99 (−70%) lows; Switch 2 Ultimate has dipped under $18; GOG bundles ~$22.99 |
| Sequel | "Project Orion" — CDP North America, Unreal Engine 5, pre-production since May 2025; realistic window 2029–2031 |
| Rating | ESRB M · Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs |
Table of contents
- The comeback: 2020 disaster → 2026 monument
- Night City as a place
- The role-playing and the combat
- Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 overhaul
- Where to play in 2026 (and what your PC needs)
- The sequel situation
- Buying advice
- FAQ
The comeback: 2020 disaster → 2026 monument
Remember what "Cyberpunk 2077" meant in December 2020: the most hyped game of its generation shipping with broken AI, holes in the world geometry, hard crashes, and a last-gen console build so dire that Sony delisted it from the PlayStation Store and every major storefront opened refund channels. CD Projekt Red's market value collapsed and "it's out" became an industry punchline.
What followed is now the standard case study in post-launch commitment: a 2022 1.5 overhaul, a September 2022 Edgerunners anime on Netflix that sent concurrent players to decade highs, the near-total mechanical rebuild of update 2.0 (September 2023 — perks, police AI, vehicle combat, cyberware, all redesigned), and the Phantom Liberty expansion three days later that critics scored higher than the base game itself. Patches continued freely through 2.3 (July 2025, adding AutoDrive and the Delamain taxi, among other things) and are now done. CD Projekt's own veterans insist the turnaround doesn't erase the launch — but 40 million copies and a wall of later honors tell you what the market decided.
Night City as a place
The thing the post-launch years quietly proved was that Night City was always the achievement waiting to be rescued. It's a megalopolis that works from two directions at once: the macro skyline — towers and holograms and smog you can read from a highway overpass — and the pavement level — noodle stands, joytoys, ripperdocs' doorways, the wet-neon retention of every district's distinct poverty. The pre-launch promise the marketing failed to cash was "a city that lives"; the post-2.0 city, where civilians actually panic and scatter when firefights start and MaxTac drops on perpetrators you're fleeing, finally approaches it.
What makes V's story stick is the same needle-thread quality the best cyberpunk fiction has: a fixer's kid rising through the machine of class from street to megabuilding, and the plot's quiet insistence that immortality, the game's literal MacGuffin, is just Night City's oldest dirty trade wearing implants. Johnny Silverhand — Keanu Reeves' relic of a dead rockerterrorist lodged in V's skull — turns the whole progression fantasy inside out: the city sells you power while the game asks what the receipt costs.
Two cities in one: the skyline promise and the pavement truth.
The role-playing and the combat
On PC this was always a shooter-RPG, not a shooter-RPG-shaped-diorama — but patch 2.0 is the version where the systems finally earn the description. The cyberware economy, perk tree and police response were rebuilt so that distinct builds actually play distinctly: a Netrunner who infects enemies' organs with quickhacks while stalking the engagement's rim in no way resembles the katana-deflector build that reads like a platinum-grade reaction test, or the Sandevistan time-dilation build, or the quiet craft-and-snipe questline.
The structural seams remain — the third act compresses choices, lifepaths still flavor more than they steer, and the first hours still over-tutorialize — but the distance between "the game people memed" and "the game on your drive" is now years of honest engineering.
Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 overhaul
Phantom Liberty (September 2023, expansion to own) is the final argument: a Dogtown spy-thriller co-starring Idris Elba as sleeper agent Solomon Reed, returning Keanu, branching consequence paths genuine enough that two honest playthroughs deliver two different games, and a tone closer to Deus Ex-le Carre than anything the base game attempted. Critics put it at 89; players at 8.9; and it's the one patch-note-era promise CD Projekt absolutely kept: this is what they said the game would be in 2018.
- Update 2.0 (free, Sept 2023): rebuilt perks, cyberware, police AI, vehicle combat, stamina, difficulty — the real "what was promised."
- Update 2.1–2.2 (2023–2024): metro system, partner hangouts, expanded photo mode, car customization, DLSS/FSR work.
- Update 2.3 (free, July 2025): AutoDrive self-driving, Delamain taxi jobline, vehicles, photo mode; switched the engine's platform matrix to include macOS and Switch 2 on the same content parity.
From 2.0 onward, the marketing sentence you can finally print honestly is: the version of Cyberpunk 2077 you should buy is whichever one you can get.
Where to play in 2026 (and what your PC needs)
Nintendo Switch 2 — a genuine launch-window port of the Ultimate Edition and one of the console's early technical showpieces (Metacritic 85): the full game + Phantom Liberty, with cross-progression to other versions. Mac — the full Ultimate Edition arrived for Apple silicon on 17 July 2025. Steam Deck — verified and comfortable. PlayStation/Xbox — current-gen native builds are the defaults; the notorious PS4/XOne builds are legacy museum pieces.
PC requirements are now the post-2.0 set — the old launch-era specs you'll still find quoted elsewhere were retired two overhauls ago, and hard-drive installs are no longer supported:
| Component | Minimum (1080p Low / 30) | Recommended (1080p High / 60) |
|---|---|---|
| OS | 64-bit Windows 10 (DirectX 12) | |
| CPU | Core i7-6700 / Ryzen 5 1600 | Core i7-12700 / Ryzen 7 7800X3D |
| RAM | 12 GB | 16 GB |
| GPU | GTX 1060 6GB / RX 580 8GB / Arc A380 | RTX 2060 Super / RX 5700 XT / Arc A770 8GB |
| Storage | 70 GB, SSD required (HDD support dropped with update 2.0) | |
The sequel situation
Whatever comes next doesn't come soon. CD Projekt confirmed the successor (internally Project Orion, Unreal Engine 5, headquartered at the North America studios) in October 2022, moved it into pre-production in May 2025, and has been honest about a four-to-five-year timeline — putting realistic delivery somewhere in the 2029–2031 window. There is no more Cyberpunk 2077 content coming: no second expansion, no new DLC, no multiplayer resurrection. The 2026 game is the complete statement.
Buying advice
- Buy the Ultimate Edition on sale. Base $59.99 / Ultimate $79.99 list, but the recurring cadence is generous: Steam's monthly ledger shows $17.99 (−70%) floors throughout 2026 — including the window this post went live — and GOG bundles have hit ~$22.99. Phantom Liberty alone lists $29.99, so the bundle arithmetic wins easily.
- GOG is the DRM-free option (CD Projekt's own store); Steam and Epic carry identical content. The physical Switch 2 Ultimate has also dipped (a December 2025 75% sale put it near $18).
- Don't buy last-gen in 2026. The PS4/Xbox One versions are the historical artifacts that started the refund crisis and they were never meaningfully rehabilitated; every current platform — PC, PS5, XSX, Switch 2, Mac — has its own native build.
- Skip "free download" copies entirely. An older version of this page linked a pirated v1.2 build — removed. Besides the obvious, a pirated 2020-era exe is a five-year-stale, inferior, pre-overhaul version of a game that costs $18 on sale and now ships three years of free upgrades with every legit copy. The pirated version of this specific game is objectively the worst version of it that exists.
- Mods: a massive, sanctioned community space via REDmod — hundreds of quality-of-life and visual overhauls mature by 2026.
Safe official links
- Steam: Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam
- GOG (DRM-free): search "Cyberpunk 2077" on gog.com
- Consoles/Mac: PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop (Switch 2), Mac App Store / steam for Apple silicon
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Cyberpunk 2077 FAQ
Is Cyberpunk 2077 good now in 2026?
Yes — and it has been since the 2.0 overhaul in September 2023. Every mechanical system the launch was mocked for has been rebuilt, the Phantom Liberty expansion outscored the base game, and the last free update (2.3) landed in July 2025. It's a finished, excellent RPG that has sold 40 million copies.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 on sale right now?
Frequently — the recurring floor is $17.99 (−70%) on Steam and it has hit that price repeatedly across 2026, including the week this page was updated. GOG bundles have reached ~$22.99, and Switch 2 sales have gone deeper still.
What is the current version of Cyberpunk 2077?
Patch 2.31 (based on the July 2025 update that added AutoDrive and the Delamain taxi content). Development is complete — CD Projekt has moved the team to the sequel.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch, Switch 2 or Mac?
Not on the original Switch. It's a Switch 2 launch title (June 2025, Ultimate Edition, cross-progression) and a full macOS release landed July 2025 for Apple silicon. It's also Steam Deck verified.
How long is Cyberpunk 2077?
The main story runs 20–25 hours; a solid main-plus-sides run is 40–60, and full completion with Phantom Liberty comfortably past 80. Its cities-of-sidequests structure rewards replaying with different builds.
Can my PC run Cyberpunk 2077?
The current (post-2.0) minimums are Core i7-6700 / Ryzen 5 1600, 12 GB RAM, GTX 1060 6GB / RX 580 8GB and a 70 GB SSD — the old launch specs you'll see quoted around (Windows 7, GTX 780) were retired two overhauls ago.
Is there a multiplayer mode?
No. The standalone multiplayer project was shelved during the post-launch replanning and never revived — Night City is single-player only.
When is the Cyberpunk sequel coming out?
"Project Orion" (UE5, CD Projekt North America) entered pre-production in May 2025; CD Projekt's four-to-five-year guidance points to 2029–2031. Nothing sooner has been suggested.
Final verdict
Six years on, the useful question is no longer "was Cyberpunk 2077 fixed?" — it's "what does it mean that a launch this catastrophic became a success this complete?" The answer: when a studio decides a reputation costs more than three years of free engineering, and the audience decides to let them try. Night City is the best city in open-world gaming; Phantom Liberty is the best spy-thriller expansion since Hearts of Stone; and at $18 on sale, there is no better-cost-to-hours ratio anywhere in 2026 catalogue gaming. Skip it only if corporates and chrome genuinely aren't for you.
Cyberpunk 2077 (2026 verdict): 9/10. The game the 2018 trailer promised — late, expensive to its makers, and finally, verifiably true.
Best for: open-world RPG players who missed the comeback; build-tinkerers; anyone with a Switch 2 or a decent PC.
Skip if: first-person RPGs don't click, or if your platform is a base PS4/Xbox One — those versions stay history's.