Four hours in now, and I want to say this so anyone jumping in can get past the steep opening. Once you go into the mill you will be attacked by two wolves. There are 50 rounds of training ammo for a makarov handgun on the table. On the corpse of the guy who was supposed to teach you things is the handgun. Grab the handgun off his corpse, grab the ammo. Then run inside the mill house. Equip the makarov and drop the training rounds onto the handgun in order to force it to load them. Leave and run away from the wolves while shooting until both are dead. Congrats, you have gotten past the most frustrating part of the game. It's all a rough economy and a surprisingly decent isometric Shadows of Chernobyl Pastiche from there on. And one which seems to keep Hobo mode going for a while.
I really don't see what the hype behind this game, even for the time. It's gory and that's nice, but it being mostly about finesse and subtlety seems to be more of an exaggeration based on the first few levels, which were where I enjoyed the game most. Shooting the crap out of everyone is actually incredibly difficult, given that once you get a starting pistol, everyone else whips out two with double the fire rate. Many aspects of the game are buggy and somewhat glitchy, the story is decent, but the real issue is how inconsistent the level design can get. It's more that once the game gets going it starts to shift away from thinking your way in and out of situations, and saving your money to shooting everything that moves with a gun just because you have to, which would be fine but many of the weapons feel as impactful as the shotgun from the original quake. To give the game credit, the AI Is rather smart, and knows how to take cover, but it rather quickly (and I mean 2-4 levels) devolves into heavier weaponry like rocket and grenade launchers, which seems a little out of place. If I had to pin this on anything it feels more like an ambitious quake mod. If you're down for that, be my guest. If you're not, go elsewhere.
