Every game is made better with an air dash, especially Cyberpunk 2077, and especially if you’re packed to the gills with military grade combat cyberware. Over the last few weeks of freelancing in Dogtown, I’ve been able to drastically slash my commute by comboing the air dash with double jumps from the reinforced tendons cyberware upgrade.
The air dash perk is gated behind the third tier of Reflex perks, requiring 15 attribute points to access. Investing the first two perk points into the node just conveys some stat bonuses for boring old ground dashes; the third point finally unlocks the air dash ability. While all the dash related perks are great for both mobility and damage mitigation, you don’t need anything other than the third level of air dash to make this combo do work for you. Next, head to a ripperdoc and pick up the Reinforced Tendons cyberware.
The super jump is dead simple to execute: jumping, dashing forward, and jumping again will dramatically extend the range of your jumps, as there’s no momentum drop-off. V even slides a little bit when they touch down, which lets you chain super jumps together like roided-up bunny hops. There’s some jank here—V will sometimes inexplicably trip and fall if they collide with some game world objects when dashing, but it’s still surprisingly fluid.
This combo was how I flew through most of Phantom Liberty‘s new area, Dogtown, and I’m now fully convinced that this is the best way to play. I’ve been playing as a netrunner, using the overclock perk to deploy the Contagion quick hack en masse. Silently soaring over a squad of mercenaries and giving them the plague before frappéing them with my mantis blades remains delightful.
I’m playing as a chromed-up, neo-kitsch X-23, with top-of-the-line military grade cyberware and a constantly overclocked cyberdeck. Compared to Cyberpunk at launch, it’s amazing to have combat that finally lets me dial into that Edgerunners vibe—constantly pushing my body to its absolute breaking point.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
There’s tons of potential for other builds using this souped-up air dash: putting points into “Body” and speccing into shotgun and health regen perks is a no-brainer, allowing V to bring a Doomslayer energy to the function. I messed around with the monowire a bit too, and found that attaching the weapon jam quickhack was incredibly effective at mitigating incoming damage.
One last thing to make this playstyle really sing: Cyberpunk 2077’s dashes are executed by double tapping the respective movement keys. This works well enough when dodging, but I found that I would often accidentally activate the dash when attempting to stealth my way through a gig—not ideal, given Phantom Liberty’s emphasis on discretion. I recommend editing the .ini to disable the double tap to dodge:
Head to the game directory and locate the config file, open up “inputContextx.xml” in a text editor, CTRL+F for “Multitap Actions”, and set both thresholds to 99. Save the file and rebind dodge to CTRL inside the game.
It’s a small thing, but I found that disabling the double tap guaranteed me enough control in situations that demanded finesse that the hassle of editing an .INI was ultimately worth it.
Coming off the back of four Cyberpunk 2077 playthroughs, two vanilla and two modded to the gills, my time with the 2.0 update has been nothing short of extraordinary, and my air dash-based build has been some of the most fun I’ve had in an open world RPG.
