alt Hacker News> this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting
Depends what you mean by "immerse". If it means driving through Night City on your bike and enjoying the view, sure.
If it means role-playing as a character and building it your position in the city via meaningful choices with consequences, really not.
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My biggest complaint about the story is that it basically robs you from player agency. You are the side character in story of someone else. It is fully forced on you. And not in traditional I say acceptable manner. I understand if you are playing story of set character. But with Cyberpunk it feels like you are not. You are just carrying someone else around.
Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.
I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)
In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.
And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.
I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type.
If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.
If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.
That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.