The first 2-3 hours are tough: you are thrown into the world, follow your "origin story" and generally aren't sure what's going on. Gamewise, things seem to be a bit odd: some NPCs clip through doors, the fancy night club has dancers, but no music is playing, cars vanish in the streets (all that was before patch 1.5, so maybe it's fixed).

But then you meet Jackie Wells, you start the main story and the city unfolds itself. Fixers send you jobs that have great and engaging stories, side quests make you visits new parts of the city, meet new people. It starts to feel alive and vibrant, which helps to overlook the odd gameplay element or glitch. Even the inventory and character systems starts to make sense, you can model your attributes to your games.

I'm now about 50h in, have played many sidequests and gigs and apparently only solved about 1/3 of the main story. It's massive and it has me coming back to meet this incredibly deep story, cast of characters and world.

Yes, the game could use more polishing, some glitches felt awkward 10 years ago in other games. The menu is a bit clumsy and not entirely consistent, sometimes NPCs just don't move when you need them to. Still, it's an incredible game with a lot of freedom and depth.

The first 2-3 hours are tough: you are thrown into the world, follow your "origin story" and generally aren't sure what's going on. Gamewise, things seem to be a bit odd: some NPCs clip through doors, the fancy night club has dancers, but no music is playing, cars vanish in the streets (all that was before patch 1.5, so maybe it's fixed). But then you meet Jackie Wells, you start the main story and the city unfolds itself. Fixers send you jobs that have great and engaging stories, side quests make you visits new parts of the city, meet new people. It starts to feel alive and vibrant, which helps to overlook the odd gameplay element or glitch. Even the inventory and character systems starts to make sense, you can model your attributes to your games. I'm now about 50h in, have played many sidequests and gigs and apparently only solved about 1/3 of the main story. It's massive and it has me coming back to meet this incredibly deep story, cast of characters and world. Yes, the game could use more polishing, some glitches felt awkward 10 years ago in other games. The menu is a bit clumsy and not entirely consistent, sometimes NPCs just don't move when you need them to. Still, it's an incredible game with a lot of freedom and depth.