Like many folks who play video games, I eventually warmed up to the futuristic open world of Cyberpunk 2077. No, it was never perfect, but the story is actually impressively well-written, the gunplay feels excellent, and just driving around can provide hours of dumb entertainment.
Recently, I got a hankerin’ to shake the fleas off this tired old dog and take it out to the pasture for a quick game of fetch. Okay, that metaphor is getting out of hand, so I’m going to abandon it. What I mean to say is that I’ve been wanting to return to Night City and amble around for a while.
Thankfully, the Phantom Liberty DLC just came out, which means it’s a fantastic time to return to Cyberpunk 2077. So I installed the new content and fired up the game, making my way toward the Dogtown area, where the Phantom Liberty content begins.
But here’s the thing: Before you get into Dogtown, there’s a small stealth section where you have to sneak into a garage. If you’re anything like me and have an appetite for troublemaking, you’ll realize that this presents you with a golden opportunity to create some true chaos for the guardians of Dogtown. There are tons of them, and if you alert one of them, the whole crowd will come gunning for you. However, there are a few places where you can bottleneck them, popping them in the head with a revolver as they come around the corner. This conflict is supposed to be un-survivable — I think it probably is un-survivable ultimately — but you can also hold off these guards for way longer than you’d expect.
And I have to admit, it’s so much fun to do this. I’ve been coming up with strategies for dispatching these guards one at a time, learning where the snipers are and discovering the locations of all the gates the guards can open (that you can’t without a high enough Technical Ability). It almost feels like an endless Horde Mode game, where you have to see how long you can survive before you’re ultimately wiped out.
If you survive long enough, the game will send elite guards after you, armed with shotguns. I can survive this if I can isolate these guys, but eventually the game will spawn in batches of them. Once I hit the point where I have four or five shotgunners who pin me in a corner, my life will inevitably end. But it’s really fun to see how long I can hold out for with each new run.
Here’s a video of just one (of many) of my failed attempts at reducing the population of Dogtown guards to zero:
At some point, I’m actually going to have to make my way deeper into the expansion content. There’s a lot of cool new stuff to see and do — or so I’m told. But for now, I think I’m going to spend at least one more evening blasting Dogtown guards to smithereens and stealing their loot. You can’t stop me; this is how I want to play the game.
