The Dogs of War: a review of Phantom Liberty

Phantom Liberty is the only extension planned for Cyberpunk 2077. I've had it installed on my big computer since its release last September, but until this week have not seriously played it. I've not played it partly because, with all the technical failures I've had over the course of this winter, I rarely had enough electricity to run the computer; but also because the first two hours of Phantom Liberty are an utterly miserable experience, shockingly poor game design, which really do not encourage you to explore further. If you're caught in this trap, take comfort: it does get (much) better.

I'll talk about those first two hours first, why they're miserable, and why I think they're bad design. But to do so, I'll tell you first about another game. You will find on this blog — you've probably already seen them — glowing reviews of both The Witcher and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. You won't find a review of The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings. Why not? I've never played it. I'm obviously a fan of CD Projekt Red, so why have I never played one of their only four significant games?

Because at the end of Chapter One of The Witcher II, there's an unavoidable fight with a kraken-like monster called the Kayran, which you cannot bypass or sneak around, which you can (apparently, I understand from other people's reviews) only defeat in one precise way, and which is massively overpowered, to the extent that, even on the easiest settings, one misstep and you're dead.

I cannot defeat it; I don't believe anyone will have defeated it on their first try.

But more: it's the nature of stories that when the protagonist dies, the story is over. Finished. Done. If the story-teller has more to say, then the story-teller has failed. The audience has got up and left.

Yes, in a game, you can reload from a save, and try again. But the magic is broken. And it's especially broken if the player hasn't made a careless error they can blame themselves for, but has been overfaced by a new situation which does not play by normal game rules and where the skills that they have learned with the game mechanics up to this point do not work.

So what do you find at the end of the first chapter of Phantom Liberty? Yes, you guessed it, an unavoidable fight with a massively overpowered opponent, in this case an enormous military robot called 'the Chimera'. When I first played the game, back in September, there was an onscreen prompt saying 'shoot the cable', meaning the cable of a heavy lighting unit hanging from the ceiling immediately above the robot. The weapon I had equipped at the time was an excellent sniper rifle with a scope which would have been the perfect tool for the job, but instead the game magicked into my hands a pistol with which I wasn't at all familiar, and with which, in the time allowed, I wasn't able to shoot the cable. And so, of course, I died; and after I had died three or four times in exactly the same way, I gave up.

I should point out here that I'd put seven hundred and fifty hours of my life into Cyberpunk 2077 when I first encountered the Chimera. I'd completed the game four times, played all of the endings. I was not a novice.

Now that I've tried again six months later, I find all you now need to do to get past that point is not to shoot the cable at all, but simply select the onscreen prompt saying 'shoot the cable'. Was that always the case? Was it always the case that by taking the prompt literally, and trying to do what it asked, I was failing the test; or have the game designers noticed that a lot of players were giving up at that point, and in the updates which have been pushed out since the release, deliberately made it much easier? I don't know.

However, 'shooting the cable' (selecting the prompt) leads you, through a series of other select-the-prompt checks, to an arena fight with the same bloody opponent. The arena provides you with plenty of cover — which gradually gets destroyed in the course of the fight, but still — and it provides you with heavy machine guns, and ammunition for them, which will gradually wear the machine down. But its main vulnerable areas are on its back, which, as it is continually trying to turn to face you, means that you must continually run to get behind it; and unless your character is very strong (Vixen isn't), you cannot run with a heavy machine gun.

This is a fight which, unless you're careless, you will eventually win, but it's unnecessary, lazy, utterly boring, without any creative possibilities, and it takes a long time. It is literally just grind.

But before you even get to the massively overpowered opponent, I'd already died more than once, in another stupid and completely unnecessary set piece. To get into Dogtown — the district of Night City in which much of the action of Phantom Liberty takes place — for the first time, you have to traverse a long-abandoned, rusting, robotised multi-story car park. This is, in effect, a three dimensional maze; and as a three dimensional maze it would have been fine. But no! the game designers decided, in their infinite wisdom, that every misstep must result the the player falling to their death; and that 'feature' still remains.

And further, both before you rescue Myers and while trying to extract her to the safe house, you have to cross considerable distances of a complex urban environment, while under attack by enemies. In each of these there are helpfully placed vehicles you can steal, but both times I've played this section so far, my game controller did not work to drive these vehicles. The game controller works for all other vehicles in Cyberpunk, but not these. Is it a bug? I don't know; if so it's a very odd one. However, controlling vehicles in Cyberpunk with keyboard and mouse is pretty much impossible, so I abandoned the vehicles and just ran.

Hello, CD Projekt Red, do you hear that silence? That's the sound of your audience, your fans, your once and future customers, switching off their computers and game consoles in disgust and going off to do something more productive.

In any case, it underlines one point: CD Projekt Red's set pieces, with which they mark major points in their plots, are always of poorer quality — and much less enjoyable — than their normal, open, fluid gameplay, at which they excel (the escape from Konpeki Tower sequence in the main game is another classic example of this), and they would really be better off abandoning set pieces altogether.

So, having got that rant out of the way, what of Phantom Liberty itself?

Well, we've already covered, in what I've described above, almost the whole of Act One: two or three utterly miserable and pointless hours of your life that you're not going to get back. Fortunately, as I've said, from this point things do get better.

The core of Phantom Liberty is a triangle of three characters, colleagues, spies, all essentially idealists, Solomon Reed, an older, senior man, and two younger women, So Mi (called usually by her nom de guerre Songbird), and Alex. These three, in the closing stages of the Unification War seven years in the past, had been (separately) ordered to betray one another; and had, as loyal servants of the state, carried out those orders. They have not seen one another since that time.

Reed appears to be in his middle years; between forty and fifty. For context, V is, canonically, twenty eight. Alex and Songbird both served as quite senior spies during the Unification War, so they must be at absolute minimum the same age as V and are probably somewhat older; in their thirties. It's clear that not only was Reed senior to both Songbird and Alex, but also that he was to a considerable extent mentor to both of them. He feels some responsibility and some affection for each of them, although he feels very considerable anger towards Songbird, whom he believes betrayed him (and we later find that this is true). There's no suggestion that there has been a sexual relationship between Reed and either of the women.

These three core characters are all, in their different ways, serious, conscientious people. Despite their profession and their exceedingly dark histories, they're all likeable. And in part this is because their parts are all extremely well written, and well played.

Now that they forced to work together again under a situation of extreme stress — the President, Rosalind Myers, of the state to whom at least two of them still feel strong loyalty (the third is more ambiguous) has survived a plane crash in a location controlled by a ruthless warlord, Kurt Hansen, who, like almost everyone else in the plot, Myers had long since betrayed — there are still clear bonds of affection and mutual loyalty between the three spies, if overlaid by bitterness and distrust.

As the story progresses it becomes clear that Songbird has betrayed the state, putting the President in a position of great risk (although also making great efforts to ensure she escapes from it), and has sold significant state secrets to its enemies. We see that she has done this in an attempt to escape from an impossible position. But it also becomes clear if it was not all along that that President Myers is a deeply amoral and extremely manipulative person, and that the state is at best dubiously worthy of their loyalty.

It's the nature of CDPR's games that you play as a first person character, directly interacting with the characters of the world. I have developed my own protagonist in playing Cyberpunk, in so far as the game actually allows you to do that. As I wrote about her before ever starting Phantom Liberty:

My character, Vixen, is female; she's small; she doesn't think herself pretty; and she's shy, preferring to be unnoticed. She's thoughtful and introspective, tending to overthink, preferring stealth to braggadocio. Going into a job she likes to make a good reconnaissance, establish a good strategic plan. But she knows that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, so her plans have many branches for contingencies; and when things start to get hot she's fully prepared to change her plan or abandon it altogether at need.

She was born on October 12, 2049 into a nomad family, largely raised by maternal grandparents, who had come in their youth from the eastern Baltic, then still part of the Soviet Union. Her father had gone to fight, as many nomad men do, in corporate wars and coups in South America and in Africa; fighting for Militech at a time when Rosalind Myers was a rising star within the corporation. Vixen's father eventually died in the Unification War in 2070, by which time Vixen was 21, and Myers was in her first term as President of NUSA. Vixen remembers enough of her father to know he was thoroughly disenchanted with Militech and believed it to be an amoral and untrustworthy organisation; and he blamed the corporate leadership, including specifically Myers, for this.

Note that canonically, the protagonist chooses to be called just 'V'. When I write about 'V' I'm referring to that canonical protagonist; when I refer to 'Vixen' I'm referring to my personal embodiment of that protagonist.

In the story, the first of the central triad you encounter is Songbird. We meet her — not in person, but as a cybernetic vision — at the very start of Act One, and her performance (and to a less extent that of Johnny Siverhand) carries you through that otherwise purgatorial first act.

Songbird, as an extremely skilled netrunner, is able to contact you via the extremely rare 'relic' chip which the main plot has long since established that you now have in your brain. She's able to do this despite all more conventional comms from the aircraft being jammed. She appeals via this link for your help in rescuing Myers from the plane crash, and offers you treatment that will save your life as an inducement. Songbird made a huge impression on me, particularly. She's intelligent — brilliant, even — complex, driven, conscientious, very much aware of all the harm she has done in consequence of her role in the state security apparatus, and now, very ill. I liked her; I felt I'd formed a friendship with her; I felt loyalty towards her.

Both Songbird and Myers had been on the plane that was shot down over Dogtown. Songbird, in her cybernetically-telepathic message to V, had been very urgent that V should rescue Myers, but makes no mention of rescuing Songbird herself; on the contrary, she tells us that she bailed out of the aircraft before impact. That Songbird is still alive is apparent from the fact that she is still communicating telepathically with V, at least until the fight with the Chimera, but she doesn't tell us where she is. She directs us to a safe house where she says that she will meet us, but when we get there she is not there; and that fundamentally ends the first act.

Myers, in the 'safe house,' tells us about Reed — but essentially, only that he's a sleeper agent, and how to contact him. We contact him, have an initial meeting, and we recruit him to the 'save the president' plan.

Reed is initially wary, but he presents as an upright, conscientious, loyal agent of the NUSA.

Reed arranges to smuggle Myers out of Dogtown, which he does without V's help; this takes about two in-game days.

Reed then introduces us to Alex, who is initially very hostile because she feels that Reed had betrayed her (which he acknowledges is true), and a plan is hatched to try to find out what has happened to Songbird.

After some days it becomes clear that Songbird is with the warlord Hansen, although whether as guest, hostage, bargaining chip or prisoner is very unclear. As Hansen is very much seen as an enemy by NUSA, Myers, Reed and Alex urgently want to get her away from him, to rescue her; but they fail to come up with a plan, until Songbird again contacts V through the relic channel.

We meet Songbird in the flesh for the first time by sneaking, with Reed, into a party at Hansen's headquarters. In the flesh, Songbird looks noticeably older and more careworn than her cybernetic avatar. She tells V that Hansen has an artefact, a macguffin, which Songbird needs in order to create the cure to the related but distinct malaises that are killing both herself and V. So the second act of the plot involves setting up the rescue of Songbird from Hansen.

There's a twist, though. Songbird wants to escape not just from Hansen but also from Myers, from the NUSA, and, consequently, from Reed. So while a plan is agreed between Reed, Alex, Songbird and V to rescue Songbird, Songbird privately urges V to join her in an alternative plan which would result in the two of them escaping together with the macguffin, thus once again betraying both Reed and Alex.

You, as the player, as V, could choose at this stage to side with Reed, but I don't know what happens if you do that because I haven't yet tried it. I think I would need a different protagonist; I think it would be wholly out of character for Vixen to choose loyalty to a state which has offered her nothing in life over loyalty to a friend in need. However in the path I have followed, Hansen, the warlord, is killed, and in the chaos Songbird and V escape from the headquarters with the macguffin quite simply. It's my understanding (but I could be mistaken in this) that Hansen is necessarily killed whichever choice you make here, because things in the later plot depend on his being dead.

As the story reaches its conclusion you are forced into a final choice, between Songbird and Reed. I think you are probably forced into this choice on every path through the story, but there's clearly only one path that Vixen could take. She's no friend of the NUSA, and feels no loyalty to Myers; she will help someone in trouble. So her loyalty in this confrontation is to Songbird. But there are no right answers here.

By this stage in the story we know that Songbird had, years before, on Myers' orders, betrayed Reed to enemies who intended to kill him and who very nearly succeeded. We know that, in the present, Myers has ordered Reed to kill Songbird, although he says he won't do this, but will instead ensure that Songbird (who is so ill she will probably die shortly anyway) stands trial for treason. We also know that Songbird has betrayed us: the cure she promised us at our very first encounter with her she cannot deliver, and she knew at the time she made the offer she would not deliver. Finally we also know that Reed had (also on orders from Myers) earlier betrayed Alex, if less grievously than Songbird had betrayed him.

The reason Songbird cannot deliver on her promise to V is that the macguffin will produce only one dose of cure, and Songbird wants it for herself.

So our choice at the end is whether to turn Songbird over to Reed, who will either kill her, or pass her on to other people who will kill her, or, at best, force her to stand trial for treason (of which she's unquestionably guilty) and spend what's left of her life in prison; or to help her to escape to a place where it's possible she will receive a cure for her illness, but from which, as a known traitor, she can never realistically hope to return to anything like home. Reed offers V the possibility, if she surrenders Songbird, that the one dose of the cure could be administered to her, but firstly that would mean death for Songbird; and secondly, I had no faith whatever that Reed would in fact be able to deliver the cure. He is a functionary of a state, and a very cynical state. He has, it seemed to Vixen, no authority to strike such a bargain, and no power to deliver on it.

Vixen chose Songbird. For her, that was very clear. But I did not find a way to negotiate this ending which does not involve killing Reed. There may be such a possibility — I hope there is — but I did not find it. And even when I knew that my choices were to turn Songbird over to Reed or to kill him, playing as Vixen, it still felt right to choose loyalty to Songbird.

Another very brief rant: in the confrontation, the game suddenly magics a large revolver into V's hand. Vixen is a small, light woman, who prefers stealth to show. A revolver is not a weapon she would choose to use. It's too heavy, too noisy, and its recoil is too powerful for her to comfortably or effectively use. At this stage in the game Vixen was carrying a very effective silenced automatic pistol which would have been a perfectly suitable weapon. It would surely not have been impossible for the game to have selected a handgun that the character actually had equipped, if the character had such a thing, only falling back on a default if they did not.

To be fair, I don't (yet) know whether if we'd handed Songbird over to Reed he would have killed her. To be fair, I expect he would not have done so himself, but I also expect that someone somewhere up the chain of custody would have made damn sure that Songbird didn't live to say anything inconvenient in her defence in court.

In the aftermath, I had a final encounter with Alex. I confessed to having killed Reed. She told me that she had been ordered — of course by Myers — to kill me. In the path through that encounter which I chose, she said she wouldn't because she knew I was dying anyway, but also that it was her job to kill me and I was to make sure not to let anyone else usurped her. Which was a very gentle and curiously warm end to the story.

I suspect that there's another path through that encounter where you don't confess to killing Reed, and where Alex does attempt to kill you; and where you, in all probability, kill her. I'm glad I didn't find that path.

In summary, this is an excellent story with a strong central dilemma, very well realised central characters, and excellent writing and acting. It's very well credited that Solomon Reed is played (and played extremely well) by Idris Elba. Having watched the end credits all the way through carefully, I notice that the CDPR marketing department's temporary copywriting intern gets a credit, but I could not see that the actress who played Songbird does, which is a huge injustice.

Of course, Elba was both the motion capture actor, and the English translation voice actor, for Reed; in the nature of how games are made the motion capture actor and the English translation voice actor for Songbird may not be the same person, but whoever they are they (both?) deserve credit, because the performance is superb.

Talking of named star actors, Keanu Reeves returns as Johnny, and once again provides a persuasive and engaging performance. But the named star actors are not in a league apart from the rest of the significant characters; even quite minor parts are extremely well portrayed.

There are a number of plot holes that cannot be ignored.

The worst is this: the trio, Reed, Songbird and Alex, had been (part of) a team of active service secret agents, carrying out operations in the field — not headquarters staff, not enormously senior. At the end of the Unification War, Reed had been set up, by Songbird on Myers orders, to be killed, and Alex had been left in charge of the Federal Intelligence Agency's operations in a small enclave in a free city outside the NUSA's borders; so these two, certainly, were not considered important or significant assets.

Yet all three — not just Songbird, whose stellar netrunning ability had (later) secured her a place in the president's entourage — personally know the president; Myers talks to Reed about 'renewing an old friendship'. So... why? Was Reed's a much more significant unit than the narrative seems to indicate?

There are various points in the plot where you can only advance by killing a significant number of enemies, these enemies being, typically, uniformed soldiers, in the early parts of the story of Hansen's 'Barghest' militia, in the later parts of the NUSA special forces (and if you make a mess of things, also of Orbital Air's corporate security forces, who would otherwise be neutral or actively allies). However, to sneak into Hansen's headquarters to rescue Songbird, Alex and V are to take the places of two young French criminal hackers whom he is employing to unlock the macguffin.

V is shocked that Reed and Alex kill the two hackers. Again, why? Yes, their deaths are strictly unnecessary, but then so are the deaths of an enormous number of soldiers, gangsters and other opponents whom V has by this time herself killed, so her protest rings rather oddly.

In a similar vein, strictly after the main Phantom Liberty story has ended but nevertheless as part of the unravelling of the consequences afterwards, a fixer, Mr Hands, employs V to frighten a number of different characters into behaving in ways that they might otherwise not, and requires her to disguise herself as a famous Cuban assassin to do so. But V must herself be by this time one of the most notorious and most feared mercenaries in Night City, a far more present threat than a foreign assassin who jets in occasionally. Again, the disguise does not make narrative sense.

As I've said above, Reed assures V repeatedly that if she surrenders Songbird to him, she will not be killed. But we know, and he knows we know, that Myers has ordered that Songbird be killed; and we also know that Myers does not tolerate insubordination. So how could Reed expect us to believe this assurance, and why would he make it if he does not expect us to believe it?

Again: V is, by the time of the start of Phantom Liberty, one of the most notorious and most feared mercenaries in Night City. Another fixer wants to employ her as a for-hire car thief. She can surely by this time command a fee far in excess of what any stolen car is worth, let alone some of the clunkers he asks for; so why would he expect her to take such risks (and why would she accept)?

There are also some minor bugs, and quite a number of jarring visual glitches (President Myers turning her head while V is trying to perform very delicate surgery on her neck springs to mind, but also, while V was in conversation with Reed his head suddenly disappeared, and she conversed quite unphased with his headless body for some time before it equally mysteriously reappeared). However, this is nitpicking. At its core, Phantom Liberty is excellent story telling, and (after that dreadful first act) an intriguing and enjoyable experience. It's not quite up to the standard of the best quests in Cyberpunk 2077 — I'm thinking particularly of Sinnerman — and it's certainly not a patch, either in scale or in narrative quality, on the Witcher III expansion Blood and Wine.

But nevertheless, overall, a very good effort, and a very good way to sign off the Cyberpunk 2077 experience.

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