Life is swell. Life is hell.

You’re thrust as a mercenary, or better put an errand boy/girl, into one of the most astoundingly well made, believable cyberpunk universes I’ve seen in recent times. The amount of detail on display here is staggering. Rundown kebab joints, glitzy club entrances, favela-like neighborhoods, and pristine highrises all intermingle in giant arcologies, bathed in grimy neon lights, infused with scents, dirt, and sweat the multitudes roaming the streets produce. The amount of work that went into this is obvious, but it makes me wonder if a world this good was “wasted” on a game like this.

It’s a shame that you’re quite often interrupted in the enjoyment of it by constantly spawning, tedious, droves of enemies that are mostly your only agency here, since you can’t do much with the rest of the world. Unless you count the civilians you will mow down in the chaotic battles, where the game won’t miss to chide you for it at every opportunity. I find that a weird decision since it has no consequences. What’s even more cranky is the very inconsistent difficulty of mob spawns, sometimes resulting in cheap deaths, regardless of the game’s difficulty setting.

There are two ways of fast travel, metro stations and a taxi. But, there aren’t that many fast travel points, making backtracking quite a common thing. And you will backtrack a lot for all the loot and sidequests scattered around. All that without a run button and very little shortcuts. Slightly shameful.

The story doesn’t even try to be something deep, and neither do the NPCs. Both are shallow, one-dimensional, and here only to serve the progress of your ramped up killing sprees. All main characters are also excessively wordy, which wouldn’t be a problem if they had something noteworthy to say and weren’t constantly repeating themselves, only using different words. You just end up getting mauled with exposition and strange terms. Quests, items, and in-game lore descriptions found in the Codex fare much better and are an interesting read.

The environment is beautiful, and the combat was quite fun.
However, neither the story nor the game's world were captivating to me in the slightest.

So I played until I encountered something i didn't feel like trying hard enough to go through.

As I said, gameplay was fun, so if you're the type of person to try any top down shooter. I'd say try it out.

Crashed more times in 4 hours than I have crashed while playing any game in the 10 years I have had this steam account.

Visually its stunning. Soundtrack is great. Gameplay is okay most of the time, lots of slow walking around.

Not a lot of weapon variety but its enough.

I cannot recommend this game because of the crashing, me and my 2 other friends basically played crash hot-potato until it became so often that we could not continue. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.