I've been waiting to write this review, wanted to give it at least 10 hours of gameplay.

The game is incredibly buggy, glitches with flickering NPCs and UI, running through people.

The whole AI seems like a placeholder to me, something they put in in the early dev stages and forgot to finish.
Cops spawn out of nowhere when you shoot someone without anyone seeing you. The stars you get make no sense.
Running around a corner makes them forget about you.

On missions, enemy AI is also incredibly buggy. You get spotted in one area, kill everyone present and move to another area and they somehow know about you and see you immediately, as if they saw you through the walls.

Pedestrian AI is unreactive, bumping into people doesn't do anything, just plays a single animation. They don't fall, they don't stumble, they don't say anything, nothing at all.

The driving mechanics seem really weird, synthetic, not natural. Running into cars or people is not enjoyable as it would be in GTA.

The character building system is too shallow, not too much space for really custom, unique characters. They advertised something completely different and it turned out to be a lie.

Overall, the most frustrating thing about the whole game is that the world feels lonely. No cop cars, co taxis, no buses, no vans. Can't enjoy being a villain like I would in GTA, just terrorizing the city.

Imo, the biggest issue is the faulty AI. Without this issue, I might have enjoyed the game a bit more.

12 hours in, but attempted a refund, reason - false advertising and performance issues.

UPDATE: first refund request declined ... I made another and I made a strong point as to why it should be refunded. C'mon Valve ...

Second request rejected. I mean, CDPR ♥♥♥♥♥♥ us all over, so how can I force them to give me my money? It's not exactly cheap, so ...

UPDATE 2: ♥♥♥♥ this, I'm gonna wait for patches

UPDATE 3 (5/13/21): The difficulty of this is so overwhelming and the enemies are so OP that it cannot be played.

Never played it again after this.

UPDATE 4 (Feb 7, 2024): God dang it, I must say that the game feels and plays much better now. Don't know why, but I just feel immersed, pulled in. Changing my initial opinion from not recommended to recommended.

UPDATE 5 (Feb 10, 2024): Wow ... I got further into the story, esp. the parallels to the main plot, and I must say that this is one of the few games that could talk to me emotionally. It really managed to pull me in. Not gonna spoil, so just gonna say that even a seemingly unimportant side character who has a couple of side quests is so well-written and believable that I just can't think of any other game that was able to do this to me. The closest would be MGS, but even that was mainly through cinematics, whereas here it's through choices you make regarding the characters.