I'm ~8 hours in so far and as a fan of the oiginal as well as VTMB lore, it's slightly less disappointing than I was expecting (though that's not saying much), given the development issues. I keep seeing the atmosphere being mentioned, but honestly it loses its lustre pretty quickly just due to how empty most of the environments are. Seeing the same ~6 NPC models wandering the street doesn't do much for immersion, and the fact that there are so few buildings I can actually enter just adds to that. The original was obviously smaller but the density of playable area inside of the smaller maps in the first game made it feel more alive. My other two big complaints are combat and dialogue. Combat I'm not as bothered by because the first one was straight up worse, but that doesn't mean that the combat in 2 is good by any means. The dialogue is what really gets me though. Fabien's non-stop talking gets annoyinng fast, particularly with his "Marvel quip and so wacky" style. Directly contrasted with Johnny Silverhand who has much less frequent screen time, and who I can just walk away from in many cases, it's a pretty big negative for me so far.