Hit about the 35 hour mark, this game is a mess but has really high highs, but I think they're too few and far between. Apologies for the incoming doctoral thesis.
The current general rule of thumb I'm working on is "any quest that finds you is good, any quest that you find is terrible". If someone calls you, you're probably in for a good quest with good writing, well-crafted encounters. If you run into a mission on the map, it's probably boilerplate filler garbage where you're just going to have to fight 7 dudes in a boring warehouse or whatever. Which, y'know, great, love to be actively disincentivized from exploring in an open world game.
I have really mixed feelings on the combat. I'm currently on Normal, and the game is just straight up too easy. I've handled the last few missions without drawing a gun, my Quickhacks are so good that they trivialize every encounter. However, when I bump the combat up, I end up running into what frankly feel like broken stealth mechanics: sight lines are weird and inconsistent and bad, the fact that an alerted enemy instantly alerts their entire network is extremely annoying, the enemy combat AI is.... just bad. The rules on what quickhacks trigger alerts feel inconsistent, and the rules on how enemies trace back to you after being attacked by quickhacks do too. Relying on all of those things to spice up combat is just as bad as it being too easy, but at least I clear the encounters quick.
Special shoutouts to fistfighting for just being straight up broken. As others have mentioned, the "damage they do in a punch v damage you do in a punch" mismatch is insane, but I'd also love to know if Rhino is out here firing ki blasts or something, because I swear I'm getting hit by punches from like 5-6 feet away.
The user interface on console is absolutely terrible. The menus are a pain in the ass to navigate, with no button shortcuts for several subheaders in the menu, making you reliant on the crappy little Destiny fake-mouse. Scrapping or selling items en-masse sucks (please for the love of god give me "mark as junk"). Managing shards and especially managing texts is an excruciating, half-baked process. There's one side job that makes you manually use a BD, and I spent five minutes trying to figure out where the hell it was before I eventually found it in my Junk.
The writing is extremely hit and miss. From the perspective of having control over the narrative progression of a main character, I don't think this is an RPG. V is as much a predefined character as Geralt is, and other than some minor quibbles about intonation you don't have any control over who V is or how they act. Despite that, I've been pulled this far into the game by some morsels of good writing in the better quests in the game. I think people expecting this game to deal in the larger conceptual themes and questions of cyberpunk as a genre will be disappointed, but I do think this game is using cyberpunk as an interesting set dressing for a more personal story about regret and coming to terms with your own mortality and lack of control over your own life, which I am enjoying. The incidental writing, and the moments where they do try to deal with cyberpunkier themes, is far more rough.
Lastly, I'm playing on PS5 at the moment (my gaming PC is at the shop getting some repairs done right now), and this thing runs like garbage. I have never closed this video game, it has only crashed, which it does approximately once every hour and a half. My movement gets bugged constantly and I am unable to run or get stuck on nothing. I am frequently unable to choose different dialogue options during a dialogue, like the cursor is stuck. The quickhack menu has about 60% odds of showing up when I highlight an enemy. This thing is busted.
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