Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 Episode 1 Review – First Impressions from Gamescom 2026

Four years after David Martinez burned out over Night City, CD Projekt Red brought the first episode of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 to Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, a little under two months ahead of its October 20 Netflix launch. Screening a premiere this far in advance is a gesture of confidence, and the team deserves credit for making it available to press in Europe at all. Having seen it, I understand the confidence — though not for the reasons I expected going in.

Spoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for Episode 1 of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2.

The King Is Dead. Long Live Weak.

The episode opens where the first season’s mythology would have ended: on a legend in full motion. A cyberpunk known on the street as “King” is mid-heist, fully chromed, moving through a room the way David Martinez used to — except there is something off in the rhythm, a hesitation, a twitch, and then the twitch becomes a cascade. Studio Trigger stages the onset of cyberpsychosis less as an explosion than as a signal degrading. It’s terrifying precisely because it’s so close to the fantasy we were sold in 2022.

Then the cut. When we next see the man, he is no longer King. His actual name is Weak, and the joke of that name is the most brutal thing the episode does. He is alive only because he paid for the best trauma coverage money could buy, and the price of being pulled back from the edge was, quite literally, everything else: the crew, the apartment, the implants stripped and sold to pay for the salvage. Trigger frames his hands again and again — fingers missing, cheap replacement hardware where military-grade chrome used to be. Nobody in Night City looks at him anymore. The show is very clear that this is the point. This is a city that only recognizes you as a person while you’re still spectacular.

If Season 1 was about the climb, the opening of Season 2 is about what the street does with you once you’ve fallen off it.

The second thread belongs to Roman, and Roman is where the episode’s real ambition lives. He’s a young cinephile who wanders his neighborhood with a camera, documenting what he sees — and he happens to be standing in exactly the wrong place, at exactly the right moment, when King comes apart. He captures it.

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The choice to build a Cyberpunk season around a character who cares about film — not braindances, not the feed, but the old-fashioned act of watching something through the boundary of a screen — is the kind of thematic swing that could easily read as smug. It doesn’t. In a world where the dominant medium lets you passively live inside someone else’s memory, choosing to sit outside the frame and look becomes an almost radical act. The episode makes this explicit in its final seconds: the signal drops, and the Cyberpunk logo bounces around a dead screen like a DVD player left running in an empty room. It’s a gag, until you realize it’s also the thesis.

Preservation, memory, and who gets to keep the record — that’s the engine here. Weak has lost his own memory of the night that destroyed him. Roman has it on tape. You do not need to be a screenwriter to see the collision coming, and the episode is confident enough not to force it in the first twenty minutes.

The other two members of the new ensemble get less time, but what’s there is deliberate. D is a Snake Nation netrunner hunting whoever wiped out his clan, and his reaction to Roman’s obsession with cinema — somewhere between contempt and curiosity — is one of the episode’s sharpest small beats. Talia, corpo-born and Maelstrom-made, is all chrome and provocation on the surface; the moment she’s offered the chance to watch herself from the outside, in someone else’s recording, something flickers behind the augmentations. It’s a hint. The episode is entirely built out of hints, which is exactly what a premiere for a ten-episode standalone story should be.

Scorsese, Not Bay

CD Projekt Red has framed it plainly since the episode first surfaced at Anime Expo: if the first season was a Michael Bay movie, the goal this time is Martin Scorsese. That’s a big sentence to say out loud, and for one episode, at least, they back it up. The pacing is slower, the violence is uglier and less choreographed, and the emotional register is closer to a crime drama than to a shonen tragedy. The studio also described the series as bringing individual Cyberpunk tabletop campaigns to the screen rather than building one connected saga — which explains the “David is dead” marketing bluntness and, frankly, frees the show from having to chase its own ghost.

Visually, Trigger has pulled off something sneaky. Kai Ikarashi and the team have leaned into a 90s animation flavor — heavier lines, grainier lighting, a certain roughness in the way bodies move — that gives Edgerunners 2 its own identity without abandoning the neon DNA. It looks like the same city shot on different film stock. Given what the show is about, I doubt that’s an accident.

One episode is one episode. I’ve been burned by premieres before, and I’ll reserve the real judgement for October. But as a statement of intent, this is about as clear as it gets: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is not interested in giving you David Martinez again. It’s interested in the people Night City has already used up, and in the question of who gets to tell their story when the city itself has stopped looking.

The first season made a lot of us fall in love with Night City. The second one, if this episode is any indication, wants to know what that love costs — and who’s still paying for it long after the credits have rolled.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premieres on Netflix on October 20, 2026.

Disclaimer: This review is based on a press screening held at Gamescom 2026, organized by CD Projekt Red.
Featured image: ©Cyberpunk: Edgerunners © 2026 CD PROJEKT RED S.A.