This. The maps are very maze-like and it is hard to stealth if you have no idea where you are going.

They are apparently patching the line of sight so it will be more reasonable but until then my recommendation for stealth is abuse darkness and corners since that seems to be the only place the AI won't see you. You will spend a bit of time looking for the right way using this path though. Once you know the patterns that the AI follows for it you get a better sense of what will and won't work along with cutting down travel time significantly because you don't underestimate the cloak time.

Cloak + force run is also quite good. Fast energy drain, but less risk of someone in a group bumping into you.

Does wall-piercing work only on small things like corners or pipes and grates, or does it actually punch through solid walls, if you can somehow see the enemies behind them?

Damn... There are cyberdemons from Doom there.

IIRC wall-piercing is the bad translation rearing it's head. It just means armor piercing. (In the sense of anti-material, e.g. it will damage a tank.)

So, it's armor piercing shotguns then. Still not bad. :)

Wait, there IS a see-though-walls upgrade! Only I can't afford it. :(

1,322 MB patch is out. Downloading now.

I like the sound of lowering the enemy aggro distances... gonna play it again tonight and see if that makes the game a lot better (which I think it might).

The patch is a pretty small improvement, I think. If you hated it before it probably won't change your mind. I still get sniped from fairly extreme distances (though it's much rarer), the enemies seem much more coordinated even on low difficulty levels, and if you get spotted the remaining jackasses in the group will tail you to the end of time and space.

Still, it did fix a large number of actual bugs, especially the extremely annoying trapped-in-a-tiny-room-with-an-instakill-manduco one in New Eden.

You still can't dual wield 444 and Damocles.

I hate Steam pricing. Even more than the DRM, I think.

The game is pretty much a sequel to their Half-Life 1 mod "Syndicate Black Ops" and unfortunately it seems to inherit some of what some might consider that mod's annoying aspects and flaws (enemies seeing you from far away, enemies spawning too frequently sometimes, and so on.)

On the other hand, I do like how the game seems to retain the odd sense of humor from the old mod. I was doing a secondary missions and all of a sudden "YOU JUST KILLED A GUY THAT LOOKED LIKE YOU!". The game also kept some of the weirdo enemies like the werewolves and cyberdemons.

I've been having quite a bit of fun with it but I can definitely see why some might find it annoying. The game is a very odd mishmash of things.
On one hand it has a lot of the Deus Ex-like FPS/RPG elements you might expect from it, but at the same time the combat has a decidedly Half-Life 1/Counter-Strike 1.6 era twitchy mentality to it that people who want the former might find really irritating.

Well, some weapons can in fact go through walls, but this isn't exactly special feature by itself since it seems that a lot of weapons in the game can to some extent.
I have shot people through walls using sound triangulation and sensitive wave and it does work if the wall is thin enough. It's a bit hard to tell how thick of a wall you can shoot through though.

Unfortunately, stealth in the game really requires use of cloak. The game doesn't have shadow stealth, which I suppose isn't surprising considering Source still doesn't do shadows well. That being said, once you get a few upgrades to the appropriate implants you can cloak for quite a long while, perhaps a bit too long.
It's long enough that when I want to I've been able to avoid the majority of enemies on a lot of maps.

Just wondering about how customizable is your character, like abilities and the like.

There is plenty of stuff to toy around with in that regard. There's the usual stats like strength, psi, and that sort of thing. There's passive implants that let you jump higher, recover energy faster, take more damage, and such. Then there's active implants and psi powers that give you new abilities like cloak, see through walls, summon clones, and that sort of thing.

However, it is worth mentioning that your stats by themselves don't matter quite as much as they would in a straight up RPG. For example, a high accuracy stat helps but it isn't going to turn you into a good marksman if you suck at aiming. Likewise, simply pumping points and cash into the appropriate stats and implants for hacking isn't going to save you if you happen to be bad at the hacking minigame.

thanks.

Ok guys, Necro-ing this to ask:

It's on sale for the next few hours, is it worth it at £7.49 for a single player, not heavily into FPS kinda guy? It looks a bit like Bioshock, in which case I'll like it. Have all the buggy issues been resolved by patches?

IMO: The singleplayer is mostly things and doing things for the most part. The only part that is really RPG like is research, cybernetic upgrades, and stats. And that are some powers like in Bioshock but no flaming/freezing/electric hands sadly. From what I've played I have found that many bugs. Also if you plan on playing stealth like grab the cloak upgrade from the medical shop since without it stealth is next to impossible.