You ever get the urge to take the Highlander movies and William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy and just artlessly mush them together like Playdough? This book does exactly that, and then tosses in a little brazenly lifted Ursula K. LeGuin material just for seasoning. It’s Legacy, the Highlander game without the license rights.
System Mastery 
How was this blatant rip-off of Highlander + Neuromancer any worse than the blatant rip-off of Cthulhu + Guyver, which you enjoyed?
It’s the difference between “It’s like X but now it’s got Y” and “This is X but we changed the name slightly”. The Guyver things from CthulhuTech were weird alien symbiotes that would drive you insane and were more fleshy than mech looking. Still basically Guyver but at least it’s modified. This is literally just Highlander with a find and replace for the terms used.
“How could you not like THING when you liked SIMILAR THING?!? How DARE you be a human being with a nuanced approach to different media, instead of an autistic robot who sees everything through a narrow-minded yes/no binary!!! How DARE YOU, sir!”
I was just curious whether it was a matter of degree, or simple lack of fondness for the source material. Apparently it’s the former, so that’s something I can keep in mind for future reference.
It was a matter of degree, and a matter of artfulness involved, basically. This book haphazardly smashes Highlander into Neuromancer with no regard for how they… basically don’t interact in any way. Granted, with Cthulhutech it would probably be best to play as a party of relatively close in power stolen archetypes, but at least when they filed off the serial numbers they then added some new fake ones. It’s like the difference between people ripping off Star Wars to make Battlestar Galactica (good, has it’s own mythology, develops new fans) and people ripping off Transformers to make Transmorphers (ludicrously dumb, designed to fool people into buying it accidentally).
I too owned a trench coat in high school. I wore it any day the temperature was lower than the mid-80s. It was only one of my many teen-aged screw-ups. This was also in southern California.
The 90s were a wild time.
I didn’t have a trenchcoat, but I had a mullet, and a mullet is basically a trenchcoat for your head.
This is the first cyberpunk RPG you read? No wonder you were mad at it. Setting aside Shadowrun, because people always get upset about the elves, there’s Cyberpunk 2020, Interface Zero, Always/Never/Now, Axon Punk (forthcoming) … there was even a d20 OGL Cyberpunk book, although it was pretty boring. I don’t know if you’ll actually like any of them, but they all sound better than this pile of crap. :)
honestly part of the old legion of superheroes fan in me wants to correct yall on this but nah they’re all stupid as fuck and Timber Wolf is just an outlier. The ones that i thought up as correctors…Sensor, Gates, and Mon-El are just. power, power, *literal name*.