If you're looking for some mayhem this Easter and you have a PS5, Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X, CD Projekt Red has just the thing: five hours of Cyberpunk 2077 for free. Posting on X, the studio announced the full details: 5 hours of play with no subscription required.
The trial is of the base game, not the Idris Elba-starring Phantom Liberty expansion, and if you're outside the US you'll need to get your time zone converter: the free trial will be available from 8am pacific time / 4pm CET on 29 March and expires at one minute to midnight PT/8.59am CET. You don't have to play all five hours in one go but if you don't use all your time by the time the trial expires you're out of luck.
If you haven't already experienced Night City, or if you haven't looked at it since the infamously awful console launch, it's well worth your time: Cyberpunk is good now.
Why it's time to visit Night City (again)
As our very own Rik Henderson wrote late last year, "Cyberpunk 2077 was once one of the most talked about games around, but often for the wrong reason". Overhyped and clearly rushed out, it suffered from an endless list of problems ranging from the hilarious to the infuriating. On next-gen consoles it was also weirdly empty, a bustling city that didn't bustle because nobody appeared to be living in it. But as Rik discovered, it's almost a different game now.
At great effort and great expense the developers have managed to make Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it should have been from day one, a sprawling, epic adventure with great combat, fun driving and a truly terrible performance by Keanu Reeves. It's a kind of futuristic GTA now, a game where you can completely transform it depending on how you play it – so if you want to run around blowing stuff up and shooting everything that moves or doesn't you can, and if you want to go a more cerebral and stealthy route you can do that too. It's not perfect: a lot of the dialogue is awful and the developers' attempts at GTA-style satire often fall flat. But as a shooter it's superb.
The Easter deal is clearly designed to win over the doubters and win back the early players, and I hope it does: it's taken a long time but it's genuinely one of the most fun games I've played on console, and it's also very, very cheap to buy now – so if you like it you can pick it up for hardly any cash and then get the brilliant Phantom Liberty expansion, which is an absolute hoot.
