Devoid of other context, the idea of playing young teens in a Lord of the Flies-style cyberpunk setting with minimal access to weaponry sounds kinda cool. Is it Cyberpunk 2020? Probably not. But the idea of a cyberpunk version of Kids on Bikes, that I could dig.
Yeah, I mean we bought it for a reason. It sounded totally rad to us, all being 14-16 at the time!
It wasn't really Lord of the Flies, though, because it was post-Cyberpunk, but a very much superficially cleaner/safer setting than 2020, and all the edgerunners were dead, retired or settled down. The corporations run the government and take "unproductive" people to camps and so on and it was more a combination of the worst government elements of Singapore and China, but in California, and less anarchist hell-hole.
It was trying too hard to be both The X-Men (or at least The New Mutants) and to be a sort of Kids on Bikes thing, trying to sort of imply you were both underground/homeless and also not, and in fact latchkey kids - like a lot of what was going on just couldn't possibly make sense if you were a homeless kid - most of it even.
I think what really put us off was the YoGangs. There were a lot of them - way more than Cyberpunk classes - nearly 30 I think. And these were the subculture your character was from, and it was just completely not believable to us, as young people, that people would be in like these perfectly delineated little subcultures, totally cut off from the others, and the subcultures themselves didn't really make sense, because like, the game treated them as if they were 24-7 things, but that's just not how life works. It was more like an adult who watches too much kids TV thinks life works or something. Especially as they were treated as little societies. It just didn't fit with anything else about the setting either. If they'd framed it totally differently and made it more like "What's your kid's main interest/skillset", maybe, but literally frame it is as these little societies/cultures.
EDIT - Also the backstory of how you got your powers didn't really add up, because it seemed like it would be too location-specific/one-off (this also meant it could only be set in and around Night City).
And I think this was what kind of killed it - the setting a lot of individually good/cool ideas, but they put together in this way that just defied belief (again especially to us, kids of exactly the age it was about - like we couldn't see ourselves or even a version of ourselves in any of the subcultures - certainly not any single one).
It could have been saved with some reworking, but it just wasn't very well-conceived. Decent art at least, unlike some!