Much can be forgiven in this game but the gameplay which is the heart of the experience is so incredibly bland and thoughtless that it makes it hard to get through the occasionally decent quest design. The main issue with the gameplay is the quickhacking, you can litterally just sit in a corner and take down everyone in night city easily this way. The enemies have no security against this and they will never find you. Considering how well some of the deus ex games did this aspect of cyberpunk, you would think CDPR would have tried to put a little more creativity and depth into this mechanic. The only way to really describe what this gameplay feels like is that it is painfully generic and makes the world CDPR built feel incredibly dumb, clearly they either didnt focus on this crucial element to the game very much, or they intentionally wanted to make this mechanic as dumbed down as possible to appease a casual audience, which seems more likely given the corporate greed that led to this games awful release. I'm doubtful that they will fix this issue and come up with a more creative and immersive way to hack enemies. But if they did the experience would definitely be a lot better, and I would probably have a decent time getting through this game. But as of right now this world feels too stupidly designed for me to want to keep playing. Its not as if this hacking system is even fun at the cost of immersion, it is both intensely unenjoyable as well as immersion breaking to be able to sit in a corner and take down armies of enemies just by quicking hacking them. The stealth gameplay is also extremely shallow, but at least they can easily build upon this in future updates, and hopefully they take the time to think critically about whether what they add actually adds to the enjoyability and imersiveness of the game.
Things that would make this game way more enjoyable 1) change the art direction immediately, make the game less cartoonish and more intense 2) come up with a better story and more interesting characters, there are tons of great movies to take inspiration from here. Preferably a story about a crazy japanese warlord, but make it intense and take some inspiration from early Splinter cell games to make the stealth feel more interesting. 3) more variety of stealth weapons and take downs would be nice as well Overall I like some of the ideas behind this game, but I think it would have been more interesting as a pure ninja stealth game, taking inspiration from movies like the Last Samurai and such. Being able to control a team of ninjas to take out certain targets or objectives is a good idea, and would work well with the overhead view this game uses.
