The skill system (imho) needs a rebalance, hacking is so insanely overpowered compared to other skills, combined with stealth it makes the game ridiculously easy, I think a good way to balance this would be to pick only 3 stats and their related perks, make one primary and the other two secondary and set limits, the primary skill can be min/maxed at will and the secondary skills have a cap on how many perk points that can be spent.
It's the same thing I think about Body and Reflexes.
Using pistol/revolver with silencer and sneak is way overpowered if you invest in it.
Investing in body makes you go ahead and incapacitate everything with a police bat.
Maybe the problem is that they wanted to make the skill progression meaningful, but lost their ways while doing it, and it killed the game balancing, making it too easy if you invest in the skill.
And without investing in the proper skill, the gun continues to do a lot of damage.
But the main problem is the AI. Enemies never tries to flank you, miss a lot of shots, have no supression fire while others moves to your position. They'll hardly hit you, if you just run around. And most of them are just there, looking around and doing nothing.
If you wear clothing with armadillo mods you're almost invincible against bullets.
Gas cylinders, and mines, as it is - are just a way to force the player to reload - it would be much more interesting to make it deal something like 95% of life damage, to force the player to retreat, instead of instant kill, or to make it deal elemental damage (fire, venom and eletric).
Now about the 3 good things:
The good points of combat, for me, is meele variety of weapons and the animations of Katana and the Hammer.
Smart weapons having some balancing, and missing some bullets are good too, to balance the combat system.
The other thing that I really like was the car interiors and exterior design, they are fantastic, the best I saw in a game until this day, and the car roarings are very nice.
The story itself is very well written, very solid character building, but the lack of equally meaningful choice is a bug flaw in this department.
If you choose not to do Panam's quests, they are locked and that's it, no other alternative story path to this choice. There is a car that you can obtain by doing that, but no meaningful content.
Same goes for Judy, if you choose not to do her quests, there nothing more to it, her missions became locked and there's no equally alternative path.
And IMO districts should have their own space in the plot line, with alternative gang missions and destiny, you should be able to choose if some gang can take control of one district, or if it should be returned to NCPD, showing the consequences of these decisions.
Well, but despite that, I'm really pleased for the content displayed, I just wish that we could have more of that.
