Short: - No RPG - Linear story - Repetitive gameplay focuses only on defeating opponents - Crafting is cumbersome in extreme! - Cynical worldview only shows bad stuff to be "deep" + Looks stunning even w/o RTX + Great architecture/world, even if dead + Great immersion in first pv I played a lot and liked the time well enough. But then after the novelty wears off nothing much stays. It's definitively not an RPG. At least not in my book. The player character V is very rigidly planned out. I couldn't make him my own. You have to solve every problem by defeating opponents through use of weapons or hacking, that shuts them down. In almost no side quest is it possible to just talk or find other ways of solving the problem. It's almost always guns or hacking. A huge amount of content are the gigs or similar small challenges, where you basically work as a murderous police-officer cleaning up the city. For what purpose? I couldn't find out and hope it's not just for the gentrification of night city so big corpos can invest more. There are almost no branching storylines. The story and world are extremely cynical. There is no feeling of doing something "punk", something wild and serving a purpose for the good of other people around you. It's extremely individualistic. You only work for your interests and those close around you. Why does this matter? If you had the choice, this would be a nice way of RP, like in the old KOTOR games, where you could become an evil sith lord. But here everything feels like a neo-liberal self optimizing trip drenched in neon light. Punk is used here like in Business Punk, using radical egoistical means to rise above others. The starting choices are a joke too. They are over in under 1h. And then the first chapter starts, which is actually very good because it's very dense. At the fringes of the city/map there is nothing to do. Nothing to explore at all. No storys are starting there like they would in a normal open world rpg.
