I played the whole game a few days after the release. I like Johnny, and the other characters, but boy isn’t that game shallow. The only reason I finished the game is because I really enjoyed the dialogues and VA, and that it was a game that didn’t overstay its welcome. I think I finished the main story at max level and it took me less than 30h. But I couldn’t be bothered with most side quests or exploring the world, as it just fell hollow, a pretty shell.

My biggest gripes with the game:

• I felt that the starting portion of the game was majorly wasted. You pick a background, but it takes 1 hour to go over it and it doesn’t matter at all for the whole rest of the game, basically. Also, they want you to empathize with your pal at the beginning but you have 10 minutes to get to know him before being thrust into a suicide mission where he dies and you get stuck with a dead lunatic in your head.
• The skill system was as shallow and uninteresting and unimaginative as it could have been. A lot of perks were like “you get +1,6% to X”. It was so boring… I heard they improved this, I haven’t checked it yet, but my hopes are definitely not up.
• The only decision you have to make in the game that can actually change the ending is literally at the end of the game, and the game even tells you it’s time to make said decision, and it auto-saves for you. Talk about hand-holding and being afraid of letting the player make real choices. For a supposed RPG, that was a massive letdown.
• No single side-quest in the game (at least the more important/interesting ones) have more than binary conclusions. Either succeed or fail, that’s it. And they can’t even be done in different ways, you have only a single way to complete them.
• Modding yourself was also super shallow, and mostly unnecessary. You could just boost hacking and memory capacity and it was absolutely broken. The game itself was super easy and not at all challenging, again afraid of causing friction with the player.