Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 Review: Night City Still Has Stories to Tell

Ready to jack back into Night City? Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is almost here, and it's bringing an entirely new crew with it. The long-awaited follow-up from CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger lands on Netflix October 20, and after four years in the making, it's clear the team wasn't interested in playing it safe.

Instead of re-running David's story, this season orbits a quartet of interconnected protagonists — and honestly, it sometimes feels like multiple shows in one. The closest thing to a lead is D. (Nazeeh Tarsha), a spiky-haired netrunner hunting the people who massacred his nomad tribe. Early on he crosses paths with Roman (Valeria Rodriguez), a wannabe filmmaker who swears by analogue photography over BDs and knows a good subject when she sees one.

Then things get heavier. Talia (Kimoy Lee) is gravely ill and has replaced failing body parts with chrome until she's more machine than human. Her thread collides with Weak Kingsley (Clancy Brown), a former Edgerunner who went cyberpsycho and had all his upgrades stripped. Once close with Talia's mother Avida (Cesili Williams), King makes saving the self-destructive Talia his redemption mission.

And then there's Capri (Brittany Lauda) — a mysterious, impossibly powerful digital construct everyone wants a piece of, including Kang Tao corpo Kiril Yang (Daniel Wu), who happens to be Talia's father. Unlike season 1's Sandevistan, Capri isn't just a MacGuffin. She's unpredictable, loves chaos, and has a history that 2077 players will definitely want to dig into.

Does the bigger structure work? Mostly, yes. You lose some of the intimacy that came from following one character across 10 episodes, but you gain a wider spread of story threads. D.'s revenge arc delivers the spectacle and impending doom, while Talia's story is genuinely somber as she reckons with a body that's failing her. King ties his fate to hers in a way that's tender and caring — a rare bit of decency in a cruel world. Roman, sadly, is the weakest link, feeling more like a storytelling device than a character.

The real star, once again, is the animation. Studio Trigger has outdone itself, delivering ultra-stylized character designs, eye-poppingly fluid action, and loving recreations of Night City locales that'll make you want to boot up the game again. Capri is a neon pink and green abstract art piece born of The Net, and the chaos she brings scales up to something reminiscent of Akira. Keeping her out of trailers was a smart move.

Wondering if Lucy or David show up? That's best discovered by watching, but there are connections — some overt, others thematic. Edgerunners 2 is an anthology, not a direct continuation, so you can jump in fresh. It can't quite top season 1, but it proves Night City still has plenty of stories worth telling. Will you be watching on October 20?