I played it when it came out after I found it in an underground chest on a desert island and got probably halfway through. I didn’t really mind the performance issues (they were BAD, don’t get me wrong) but I hated how the game was broken to its core. It wanted to be both an open ended RPG and a narrative action adventure game, resulting in something I like to describe using this metaphor: if the game was talking to you, it would sound like “YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT, CHOOSE YOUR PAST AND WRITE YOUR FUTURE! But actually no, you’re a predetermined character with an established personality and traits. BUT YOU CAN CHOOSE HOW YOU INTERACT WITH THE WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS AND WATCH THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS UNFOLD! But not really, choices slightly change the way you get from point A to point B, except maybe in the sidequests”.

Regarding the open ended “write your own story” RPG aspect of it, It’s INFURIATING choosing to have a certain attitude towards a character when the game gives you the option just to see the protagonist act in a completely different (and totally unambiguous) way in the next line of dialogue, but the game creates this kind of contradictions even by itself. I remember that in the beginning of the game you see V freaking out when they realises that Johnny is in their head, insulting him and screaming and asking him to leave their head. Then you start playing, go in the street and not even 5 minutes later you can trigger a cutscene from a side quest where you see the two of them getting along like two good old friends. That shouldn’t happen, and it’s just completely broken narrative design that spoils me the evolution of the relationship between V and Johnny. They could have avoided it by simply unlocking the side quest after a few main missions.

On the Action-RPG side of things, everything’s great on paper but with deeply flawed execution. I wanted to be an hacker, and after not even half of the game I could kill EVERY enemy in a building before even entering it. The same goes for the shooting, where you have a classic resistances and weaknesses system (e.g. if I shoot fire bullets enemy A will get x.5 damage and enemy B will get x2 damage) that is literally useless. After a while I stopped paying attention to it and it didn’t make a difference, not a noticeable one at least (and it would have been useless anyway since I could kill people just by staring at them through walls).

Overall, performance aside, it felt like an alpha version of a game, where you have some systems that kinda interact with each other and that not only need to be smoothed but often times reworked from the ground up. It is (or at least was at the time) a game without internal coherence from a semiotic point of view: it kinda knows what it wants to tell you but not well enough to not completely fail in how it tells you.

Of course they patched it since, and it looks like this dlc could address some of these problems, but I think that the criticism focused on the wrong things.

The city is beautiful though, probably the only time I felt like walking in a real city, and the game still kept me hooked for 20-ish hours so it probably isn’t completely terrible. It’s also worth mentioning that I was, using accurate and scientific terminology, hyped as fuck for this game as if it was the second coming of Christ and this surely impacted my judgement of it.