If I were to go into detail about my opinions of this game I could go on for hours, perhaps even days, so I'll limit myself.
I expected a well developed, thoughtful, themed rpg/shooter.
It largely lived up to my first impressions, the intro mission being among the most polished in the game. The story quest is quite good too. The environmental art is amazing, I don't think you'll encounter anyone who thinks otherwise.
Most of those first impressions hold up as long as you stick to the core story and treat it as 95% conversational RPG with an inventory system and hacking mini-game.
Where it fails is everywhere else. Every single thing about the game other than the art is terrible. The driving is bad, cars are lackluster, UI is barely passable and frequently useless or simply doesn't do its job, characters are dull, AI is ... not by any stretch of even the most generous terms 'intelligent'. Even just walking is bad; I expected that the PC should be able to walk without feeling like the character has slinkies for legs, wobbling & skating around. At least moving into a run or turning isn't a weird space-walk-like lunging process like it is in some other games.
Game balance is _shockingly_ bad. The gear/upgrade/crafting system would make an amateur blush. It fails utterly to instill or support an aesthetic other than 'absolute clown' and constantly wrecks any sense of immersion.
In the best gear I can get at the moment for example, at level 40 my character is wearing a pristine white tuxedo vest with pearly blue bow tie, a flickering screen over his eye, some kind of Mexican inspired bandanna that's half black, half crazy mix of reds and yellows, a knee length black plastic jacket, worn yellow raver pants and grimy old boots that look like they were fished out of a river.
There's no path in gameplay to progress gear or ... I'm going to cut myself off here. It's bad. Really, really bad. I never imagined that a game with this kind of pedigree behind it could be so jaw-droppingly incompetent, even just on one front let-alone almost every aspect of the game.
At an absolute minimum, an absolute - pressing a button to perform an action (like opening the characters inventory or map) should reliably perform that function. CDPR can't even accomplish that.
I want to like this game, but every time I start it up and play for more than a few minutes I have to stop and wonder at the art. I'll just cut myself off there, nobody's interested in pages of criticisms.
It looks nice. In terms of actual immersion and function though, games like Shadowrun Returns blow it out of the water.
I never in my wildest dreams imagined that a game like this would offer such extraordinary incompetence.