DIsclaimer: I have played the game before 2.0, I may or may not redo the review once I play 2.0 but I geniunely was never hooked throughout the whole game to warrant that.

tl;dr 5/10, defo rushed, if you must, buy it on sale in a year or two

5/10, a game that serves as a lesson on why you shouldn't rush a release and could be a dictionary definition of a wasted potential. the game is decent, the story is somewhat engaging but any attempts at getting immersed in night city are ground to a halt by an insane amount of bugs that range from small and harmless npc pathing bugs to game breaking glitches and softlocks that require you to reload the game, sometimes even few hours back if you try to do side content in the meantime. the fact that in the leaked prototype footage the game was predicted to be released in 2022 is really telling of why the game is in a state it is now.

what's also disappointing is lack of actual consequences of what you are doing or how many implants you have (remember that first gameplay trailer with humanity cost on implants? i remember). it takes away a major part of what makes cyberpunk, cyberpunk.

you are also seemingly on a time limit but in reality you only suffer consequences of the biochip when it's convienient for the plot. i'd much rather have a forgiving timer over something that only matters when it's convienient for the plot. same with omegablockers which you can take only when it's convienient for johnny to shut up.

your relationship with johnny is also fishy, after you make your first contact with johnny which is on a really hostile terms, you can go do side quests during which you seemingly are on neutral/good terms depending on your answers which makes no sense whatsoever. also your overall dialogue choices towards johnny outside of "chippin' in" sidequest where you can go from being on awful terms to V considering giving up his body for johnny.

sidequests vary in quality but that's to be expected in an open world game. the overall experience would be good with them if not for them softlocking seemingly at random sometimes.

the combat is geniuely fun, while enemies sometimes phase through solid objects and behave rather... erratic, it's still really fun, no complaints here. it's even better because you can change your playstyle completely on subsequent playthroughs and you can actually feel the difference between the builds, their strengths and weaknesses. gorilla arms ftw.

if the main focus of the game was gameplay I actually would've recommended it but it's an action rpg so the story is the main focus and the story itself is quite lacking. it has it's moments but overall my experience was quite frankly spoiled by the amount of bugs i was experiencing.

the game should've been delayed by another 2 or 3 years even but as far as we can all see, people praise this unfinished mess and claim it's been fixed while it clearly wasn't. it sucks that providing a half baked product only for it to be "fixed" is enough to appease the mob