Aside from being a great, redeeming addition to the base game, Phantom Liberty is a beautiful reminder of the peaks of writing and visual art that can be achieved in RPGs. It's up there for me with Deus Ex: Human Revolution and The Witcher 2.

It still suffers from being attached to a comparatively unfocused open-world game. Certain action setpieces, such as fleeing the Chimera tank, are gorgeously executed and nerve-wracking; others feel rote. One feature of the base game (and indeed the genre) I wish was less emphasised is the periodic mandatory combat arenas with hordes of mooks who need to be slaughtered to advance the plot. It makes V's shock at, for example, the assassination of two netrunners seem ridiculous.

The one place the story seriously falters is in the ultimate choice of betraying either Reed or Songbird. Having played both forks after that point to the climax of Songbird's story, I noticed that, however difficult the decision was initially, each character is somewhat massaged to justify your choice in retrospect. If you side with Reed, he is sympathetic and conflicted about his dual loyalty to his friend and his country, whereas Songbird, giving in to possession by an AI, massacres a small town's worth of civilians and tries to unleash the apocalypse. If you side with Songbird, on the other hand, Reed openly connives to murder you and Songbird in a massive terrorist attack on a spaceport, while Songbird is shown to be vulnerable and remorseful about selling out her friends under coercion.

Even so, despite what I see as a bit of a cheat on the writers' part, the story as a whole is compelling. It mostly keeps its moral grounding and makes you think harder about right and wrong than most games — faint praise but still — and the sci-fi concepts that it delves into are cool in themselves and gorgeously realised.