Cyberpunk 2077
CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world RPG played in first person. You're V, a mercenary for hire in Night City, a Californian megacity where Arasaka and Militech set the rules and street gangs fight over whatever's left. The setting comes from Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk tabletop RPG. The game is playable on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Apple Silicon Macs, while the PS4 and Xbox One versions stopped getting major content updates in 2022.
Top 3 Reasons to Play
- Keanu Reeves spends most of the game in your head. His Johnny Silverhand reacts to nearly everything V does, mocks your decisions and gets his own arc, and the two can end up close friends or barely tolerating each other.
- Six districts are packed into a dense, vertical map, from City Center's corporate plazas to the half-built resort towers of Pacifica. Past the city limits, the Badlands desert gives driving and the nomad storylines space the streets can't.
- Your build shapes more than combat. Enough Body lets V force a door, the right Technical Ability or Intelligence score finds another way in, and attribute checks add extra dialogue options along the way.
Story and Lore
On paper, Night City belongs to the Free State of Northern California. In practice, Arasaka and Militech run it with private armies. Most of the backstory comes from the tabletop game, including the Fourth Corporate War and the breakup of the old United States into the New United States of America and a handful of independent states.
Before the story proper, you pick a lifepath. Nomads start in the Badlands, Streetkids in Heywood, and Corpos inside Arasaka's counterintelligence division, where things go wrong within the first hour. Each lifepath has its own prologue and extra dialogue lines later on, but the main plot is the same for all three.
Fixer Dexter DeShawn hires V and partner Jackie Welles to steal a prototype biochip, the Relic, from Arasaka's Konpeki Plaza hotel. It goes badly. V ends up with the chip in their head, and on it is the engram of Johnny Silverhand, a rockerboy who died in 2023 after attacking Arasaka Tower. The Relic is slowly replacing V's personality with Johnny's. Stopping it drives everything that follows, through Arasaka family politics, the Voodoo Boys' netrunners and the Aldecaldos nomad clan.
Phantom Liberty runs a separate spy storyline in Dogtown, a walled-off part of Pacifica, and slots into the main campaign rather than replacing any of it.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Guns, blades and quickhacks all work in the same fight, and switching between them mid-encounter is normal. Progression was rebuilt in Update 2.0 (September 2023): five attributes, Body, Reflexes, Technical Ability, Intelligence and Cool, each open their own perk tree. Separately, five skills called Headhunter, Netrunner, Shinobi, Solo and Engineer level up as you use related abilities and grant passive bonuses.
Ripperdocs sell cyberware, and how much V can install depends on a capacity stat. Arm implants such as Mantis Blades, Gorilla Arms and the Monowire turn V's hands into weapons. The Sandevistan slows time for a few seconds, while a cyberdeck lets netrunners hack cameras, turrets and enemies' own implants from cover.
Firearms fall into three types:
- Power weapons, whose bullets ricochet off hard surfaces.
- Tech weapons, which charge shots that can penetrate cover.
- Smart weapons, firing guided rounds that home in on targets.
Iconic weapons are unique versions with fixed perks, usually tied to a character or quest. Johnny's Malorian Arms 3516 pistol is one of them.
Away from the main jobs, fixers in each district offer gigs, and NCPD scanner hustles and cyberpsycho sightings are scattered across the map. Some quests use braindances, recorded memories you rewind and scan for evidence. Cars and bikes come from the Autofixer site. Since 2.0, the NCPD chases V after crimes and you can shoot from moving vehicles, and Update 2.3 (July 2025) introduced AutoDrive for hands-off travel.
Character creation treats body type, voice and appearance as separate choices. Outfits saved in the Wardrobe are purely cosmetic.
Characters and Factions
V is voiced by Gavin Drea or Cherami Leigh, depending on the voice picked in character creation. Jackie Welles, a Heywood merc with big ambitions, is V's partner at the start. Two major side-story leads are Judy Alvarez, a braindance technician working with the Moxes out of Lizzie's Bar, and Panam Palmer, an Aldecaldos nomad who brings V out to the Badlands. Goro Takemura, once Saburo Arasaka's bodyguard, becomes an uneasy ally after the heist. Rogue Amendiares owns the Afterlife mercenary bar and was Johnny's partner decades earlier, while ripperdoc Viktor Vektor handles most of V's early implants.
Arasaka is the main corporate presence in the story, with Militech, Kang Tao and Biotechnica also in play. Adam Smasher, a full-body cyborg on Arasaka's payroll, links the present plot to Johnny's past.
Gang territory breaks down roughly like this:
- Maelstrom: Northside, Watson
- Tyger Claws: Japantown, Westbrook
- Valentinos: Heywood
- 6th Street: Santo Domingo
- Voodoo Boys: Pacifica
- Wraiths: the Badlands
The NCPD and its MaxTac unit police the streets, and Trauma Team sells armed medical response to anyone who can pay for a subscription.
Editions
There are three ways to buy the game. The Standard Edition is the base game with every free update and free DLC item. Phantom Liberty is a paid expansion that needs the base game to run, and the Ultimate Edition, available since December 5, 2023, bundles the two. PS4 and Xbox One owners can move to the PS5 or Xbox Series X|S version at no extra cost, the only way to play Phantom Liberty on those console families.