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