I mentioned The Heist being a huge disappointment earlier and it's another instance of the same thing - the writing department came up with this idea where you're gonna infiltrate a big corpo hotel, compromise security with the spiderbot, steal the Relic and witness Saburo's murder etc. Cool! This is great stuff, you give to IO Interactive or Looking Glass or Ion Storm and you've got a banger of a mission guaranteed. But they didn't... they gave it to CDPR's gameplay department. And they came up with, well, the usual - a bunch of walk-and-talk, a pixel-scanning BD sequence disguised as the spiderbot segment, and some corridor shooting at the end. Now, okay, maybe CBP doesn't have the gameplay system to support the Budapest Hotel, 2077 Edition (though I still think they could've gotten creative), but it does have the mechanics to at least ape part of Thief. Casing the Joint / Masks, anyone? And Deus Ex, as usual, offers the most damning parallel - breaking into VersaLife.
You know that you can hang around Konpeki's bar after you check in? You get past the receptionist and you can either head straight to your room with Jackie or let him go ahead while you go knock back a couple. Naturally, having been educated by decades of better gaming, I chose to take the opportunity to explore and snoop around, but I still have no idea what that was supposed to do... Was there something to find there that I didn't? Something that changed my approach to the mission? I just went around, clicked on a couple of pointless NPCs, then gave up and went to join Jackie. It's a consistent problem, the studio spends so much effort on this spectacular trim but neglects to tie it in to agency and gameplay. It's all style and no substance.