A complicated mess that requires a more complicated assessment than my tiny brain can offer. It is VERY clearly unfinished, you can practically feel the lingering absence of certain mechanics - almost as if the game is riddled with holes from when they were ripped out during the crunch phase. What awful turbulent development did this game go through for it to take 7~8 years to make what is essentially just Rage 2. It's neither a pointed immersive sim or a sprawling interactive open world.

There's stuff to like here, I'm immensely endeared to the sheer level of detail in Night City's design. It's not often an open world lends itself to a sense of verticality with wonderfully designed multi-level roads and walkways that bob and weave haphazardly through the skyline, entirely different styles of colour scheme and architecture when you across districts. Walk from one end of a street to another and be greeted with a new vista. It's genuinely gorgeo. Keanu gives his best performance since Bill & Ted and I'm not even kidding.

I just hate Borderlands DPS-FPS design so much. A litter tray of skill tree perks that make invisible percentile changes and shooting guys just to watch numbers pop out of their heads until they die. It’s never been satisfying, I never win an encounter with a sense of accomplishment, just that I had a gun powerful enough for the task at hand. Why have we done nothing but regress from what FEAR 1 accomplished?

The narrative design is weak overall, each character archetype being funnelled into the same canned timeskip sequence and starting point is about all you need to know you're not freely role playing at all. I love going to undiscovered side gigs with the flavour text "Who knows what you might find?" only for a phone call to completely spell out the entire mission when I enter its proximity. Really keeps any sense of adventure and wonder intact. The only sidequest I didn't complete was the one that I couldn't get working, which it turns out was about a character voiced by Grimes lol. Fuck outta here. What really takes the cake is that every significant-feeling moral choice I've made has absolutely no payoff ingame, and essentially feel like DLC bait. The game aint fucking done.

Is it the best often-delayed and buggily released open world game where you play as a person with a bunch of tricked-out gadgets who is fighting against time to remove a parasitic person in their head who appears as a snarky vision that leans on walls and makes fun of you, but is actually going to end up replacing you and has a bunch of unnecessary driving segments that nobody really likes I've ever played? No, that's Arkham Knight.

Considering the game is riddled with as many craters as the moon, I'm trying to cut some slack and credit the creators for what they ACTUALLY accomplished in spite of soulcrushing crunch. This is the forty-hour sunk cost fallacy sinking in;-

Being worse off financially for taking moral high roads in missions, cops being so ineffective that they pay you to do their work for them (of course the wanted system is shit, they can't chase you if they wanted to). Living ethically is a luxury you don't always have a choice to make. You have to shred your humanity to pieces with body augmentations just to stand a chance. When the game isn't trying to be a visual wonder or a David Jaffe-esque piece of tryhard shit, its systems compound into something a little more meaningful than I think I gave it credit for in the beginning. There's stuff here, it's hard to stomach, but I like that they did it.
Cyberpunk speaks clearly against the way society dehumanises us, it points a condemnatory finger to the corrupt systems that nourish it, and does everything in its power to make you feel chained to your complacency. It tells you again and again that the system doesn't work, it shows the people who idolise it dying senselessly and unceremoniously, it's telling you that we should do better - that the monolith of human achievement in the form of 2077's Night City is a smoke and mirrors act that disguises the same problems plaguing our world today. I'm no genre genius, but if this is "Cyberpunk", then go the fuck off. Some of these questlines struck a nerve, genuinely good pieces of writing, they just didn't need to be in a game that is this fucking bloated.