The Not-So-Good
Zoomed out of details. Sometimes the thrill of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk is the nitty-gritty specificity. A player who has mastered the system, can buy an Ares Predator 2 pistol, apply the correct mods and enhancements, load it with the correct type of ammunition and end up with a satisfying synergy of awesome gun. This is how players who master the game mechanics are rewarded. Neon City Overdrive zooms out so this kind of system mastery is not needed. Your Ares Predator is now a gun with the Deadly tag. This is okay, I guess? It achieves the same end result, but there is a loss of granular detail.
Gambling gear in character creation. When you create a character, you get basic gear for free. Basic gear can be anything, but it does not give a bonus dice when used. You also get some Special gear. Special gear *does* give a bonus dice when used. You can have up to 4 items of Special gear, and you can decide how many Tags you want the item to have. "Quiet" is an example of a Tag you might put on an assassin's pistol. If you put only 1 Tag on an item, you get it. If you want additional Tags on a single item, you roll a dice to see if you get it. This felt a bit weird to me. We had one character who got lucky with a Super Awesome Mega gun, and other players didn't want to risk it and chose conservative items. This is the only randomised part of character creation.
Dangerous enemies need some tweaking of rules. There isn't a way to scale threats, except by adding more Hit points to them. It doesn't matter if you are fighting a squirrel or a tank, each Tag possessed by an enemy only adds 1 Danger dice to a player's dice roll. So, mechanically, a squirrel with "Nasty bite" and a tank with "Explosive shells" both only add +1 Danger dice. You need to stack Tags to pile on additional Danger tags. I guess it is up to the GM to use common sense and say that the tank's threat gives more than 1 Danger dice. But this is not rules-as-written, and none of the provided enemy stat blocks are built that way. I fumbled this in an early session, and a supposedly deadly alien threat felt weak.
Lacks a mechanism for ongoing situational disadvantage. Players have Trademarks and Edges, which are tags that give them a bonus to dicerolls. When it comes to negative tags, Conditions and Traumas seem to be the only tools that are available. Conditions are temporary (e.g. "Exhausted") and they apply in situations that make sense. The trouble is that, according to page 35, Conditions are not supposed to last longer than a scene. And Traumas are permanent tags that apply to *every roll*, regardless of what the roll is for (e.g. "Weakenned Heart"). (Which feels weird to me, as the example Traumas are things like "Missing Finger", "Wounded Pride"; and I can think of lots of situations when missing a finger would not matter at all, but Traumas always apply to every roll). What is missing is a mechanism for something like "Arachnaphobia" which is a permanent tag, but which only applies in certain situations. I just found myself houseruling that certain Conditions do not expire between scenes. Whenever I houserule something, it means the game was missing something I felt was necessary, so I am recording it here but it is not a big deal.
PCs need a few more tags. Your character has 3 main tags, with 5 sub-tags. In practice this didn't feel like quite enough for me. The tags are all skill and profession oriented, such as "Hacker" and "Infiltrator" and "Pilot". I would be generous and add a few more tags to starting characters, because our PCs felt like their skillsets were a little narrow focused.
