If you had of asked me my thoughts within the first 15 mins of gameplay, even the first hour, I would have told you "Cyberpunk is a complete let down".
First of all, I thought I might be able to run it on high settings, but forgot that this is not a 2.5 year old PC, and this is the crysis of this decade. It was frame to frame choppy, so I bumped it down to normal and it was 60+ silky smooth. I'll need to tweak to get the most out of this pc, but I'm running on the last of the GTX (1080), before RTX so no ray tracking, so not a great deal of point in tweaking it over getting a new GPU. I just modded some shaders (reshader) and the game looks amazing now so I called it a day.
So, first cut scene, finish the very first conversation, turn around and the very first NPC I see in the game is missing legs. (I now think it was the graphics level change mid game, but at the time I was blown away by how quickly I saw a rather crude bug). Non main NPC are totally flat. One liners. Solid things that you can't even bump into. Other 'Actor' NPC's walk around in a fixed animation. So fixed that they didn't want to bother with blended animations or being able to interact with so instead, they just phase through you, like ghosts. About the 5th NPC i come up to pulls out a smoke in one hand, then her other hand comes up to light it but her lighter is flying around doing spins in the air, no where near her hands. Peoples mobile phones come out of their hands and float in the air. Guns do the same thing. They have a huge issues with props, It reminds me of the X series, I never played the last one, but 1 & 2 always had issues with this, even after years of patching.
And, btw, this is all within the very first room of the game!
It might look better on higher graphics, but the random NPC's aren't that detailed. They don't even look at you when you try to talk at them, they just spit out their one line, half of the time without opening their mouths, sometimes while taking drinks, also I saw a cop drink from a can with the can facing the wrong way..
The main crafted NPC... they are amazing. You can tell they are animated with real actors. It always throws you into the game in cut scenes and just normal chats with these people, which is amazing, but jarring when you go from that to talk to a random NPC..
It got to the point were I was just testing for bugs, and limit testing the 'so called sandbox' element. I was so disheartened. I was so close to quitting and going to bed early. Then I decided to play the game as 'it' wanted me to...

8.8 hours... I continued playing it straight until sunrise (oops). It's a story game first. The cut scenes are gold, AAA all the way. That's where they spent their time. A little bit of a shame, but when I dove in I was rewarded. The story so far, AAA. While I can not contest to some reviews that say the choices are a lie, I did however ♥♥♥♥ up a main quest, then ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over someone in order to selvage it, and ended up teaming up with the people that I was meant to take down. Completely different from every other play through I have seen online. I started to explore the city a bit, I was disappointing that more than half of it was off limit, not so much that I had to wait to unlock it, but the fact that they just used a really cheap teleport trick with a message "This part of the city isn't available yet". While on my main mission I continually got side missions messaged to me, and as I travelled around I got more and more icons of gangs, hidden stashes and events added to my map. I got sooooo distracted. It was honestly, a world of fun. I was on my main quest but I just kept cleaning up the streets while I was at it. I didn't feel limited to one mission at a time, which was cool.
The gameplay...

The combat in this game is amazing, AAA. The kick of the guns, the levelling system of using things, you really do feel like you are getting better at something, which is a hard thing to translate in games. But they pulled it off with small penalties which were slowly reduced over time. Like panning left or right while aiming has a slight random up/down movement to it so you are always slightly readjusting. This feeling less and less as you level and spec. The movement, automatic cover and peeking when aiming lets you look around corners without popping out like most games. and not locking you to covers like others. You see dmg numbers, but it's so clean and non intrusive, one of the best I've seen. The feeling with gun fire going off, the back and forward swearing, threats and commands of both sides. Destructive environment, motion blur while making a mad dash to your next cover. It's all so clean. I'm not a big fan of FPS, but it feels amazing to play. The driving took a little to get used to, but later on I felt it much easier when I got a better car, you can really feel the difference. In my entire first 8.8 hours of gameplay (minus the first hour of messing with the game to test it and the distraction of the city) all I did was the very first main mission/Act. My house mate woke up for work and came out as I was finishing Act 1 and the opening title "Cyberpunk 2077" comes up on the screen lol. An amazing first mission, a quest line that had optionals and choices along the way. Prepare (like I did) or go in without a plan. I have spent many more hours on the game now and there seems to be endless side missions and quests. I'm so over the moon happy that I'm still a very low level. Most games hand it to you with no work, but I feel like I could play this game for weeks and still be tweaking my character.
I can see myself spending many many more hours/days in this game.

If you had of asked me my thoughts within the first 15 mins of gameplay, even the first hour, I would have told you "Cyberpunk is a complete let down". First of all, I thought I might be able to run it on high settings, but forgot that this is not a 2.5 year old PC, and this is the crysis of this decade. It was frame to frame choppy, so I bumped it down to normal and it was 60+ silky smooth. I'll need to tweak to get the most out of this pc, but I'm running on the last of the GTX (1080), before RTX so no ray tracking, so not a great deal of point in tweaking it over getting a new GPU. I just modded some shaders (reshader) and the game looks amazing now so I called it a day. So, first cut scene, finish the very first conversation, turn around and the very first NPC I see in the game is missing legs. (I now think it was the graphics level change mid game, but at the time I was blown away by how quickly I saw a rather crude bug). Non main NPC are totally flat. One liners. Solid things that you can't even bump into. Other 'Actor' NPC's walk around in a fixed animation. So fixed that they didn't want to bother with blended animations or being able to interact with so instead, they just phase through you, like ghosts. About the 5th NPC i come up to pulls out a smoke in one hand, then her other hand comes up to light it but her lighter is flying around doing spins in the air, no where near her hands. Peoples mobile phones come out of their hands and float in the air. Guns do the same thing. They have a huge issues with props, It reminds me of the X series, I never played the last one, but 1 & 2 always had issues with this, even after years of patching. And, btw, this is all within the very first room of the game! It might look better on higher graphics, but the random NPC's aren't that detailed. They don't even look at you when you try to talk at them, they just spit out their one line, half of the time without opening their mouths, sometimes while taking drinks, also I saw a cop drink from a can with the can facing the wrong way.. The main crafted NPC... they are amazing. You can tell they are animated with real actors. It always throws you into the game in cut scenes and just normal chats with these people, which is amazing, but jarring when you go from that to talk to a random NPC.. It got to the point were I was just testing for bugs, and limit testing the 'so called sandbox' element. I was so disheartened. I was so close to quitting and going to bed early. Then I decided to play the game as 'it' wanted me to... 8.8 hours... I continued playing it straight until sunrise (oops). It's a story game first. The cut scenes are gold, AAA all the way. That's where they spent their time. A little bit of a shame, but when I dove in I was rewarded. The story so far, AAA. While I can not contest to some reviews that say the choices are a lie, I did however fuck up a main quest, then fucked over someone in order to selvage it, and ended up teaming up with the people that I was meant to take down. Completely different from every other play through I have seen online. I started to explore the city a bit, I was disappointing that more than half of it was off limit, not so much that I had to wait to unlock it, but the fact that they just used a really cheap teleport trick with a message "This part of the city isn't available yet". While on my main mission I continually got side missions messaged to me, and as I travelled around I got more and more icons of gangs, hidden stashes and events added to my map. I got sooooo distracted. It was honestly, a world of fun. I was on my main quest but I just kept cleaning up the streets while I was at it. I didn't feel limited to one mission at a time, which was cool. The gameplay... The combat in this game is amazing, AAA. The kick of the guns, the levelling system of using things, you really do feel like you are getting better at something, which is a hard thing to translate in games. But they pulled it off with small penalties which were slowly reduced over time. Like panning left or right while aiming has a slight random up/down movement to it so you are always slightly readjusting. This feeling less and less as you level and spec. The movement, automatic cover and peeking when aiming lets you look around corners without popping out like most games. and not locking you to covers like others. You see dmg numbers, but it's so clean and non intrusive, one of the best I've seen. The feeling with gun fire going off, the back and forward swearing, threats and commands of both sides. Destructive environment, motion blur while making a mad dash to your next cover. It's all so clean. I'm not a big fan of FPS, but it feels amazing to play. The driving took a little to get used to, but later on I felt it much easier when I got a better car, you can really feel the difference. In my entire first 8.8 hours of gameplay (minus the first hour of messing with the game to test it and the distraction of the city) all I did was the very first main mission/Act. My house mate woke up for work and came out as I was finishing Act 1 and the opening title "Cyberpunk 2077" comes up on the screen lol. An amazing first mission, a quest line that had optionals and choices along the way. Prepare (like I did) or go in without a plan. I have spent many more hours on the game now and there seems to be endless side missions and quests. I'm so over the moon happy that I'm still a very low level. Most games hand it to you with no work, but I feel like I could play this game for weeks and still be tweaking my character. I can see myself spending many many more hours/days in this game.