I wanted to love this cyberpunk point-and-click adventure. It begins with a dramatic and fun prologue shown in comic book panels, then throws you into a world of grime, danger, dystopia and sarcastic robots. The inversion of the usual stratification of rich and poor is an interesting twist, with the wealthy living in the shadows of skyscrapers at ground level and blue-collar laborers toiling at factories high in the sky, and there are a few surprises and laughs to be had through the adventure. Unfortunately, the gameplay is rather lacking, with lots of tedious backtracking, pixel-hunting of items (some of which blend almost perfectly into the background), and unbalanced puzzles. Some of the puzzles are fine, requiring common sense or some thought, but many depend on certain areas opening up unannounced after completing an unrelated task, or on solving obvious puzzles without any clear in-universe reason for doing so, then hoping the results will somehow be useful later. The game often abruptly dead-ends with no hints of what to do next, making the only viable strategy either consulting a walkthrough or using every item on everything until eventually some combination works in a way you never would have anticipated. The voice acting is decent and the dialogue is good, but conversations are short and to the point for the most part, leaving the world and characters feeling underdeveloped. The humor and wackiness mesh rather badly with the darker themes of the game, and the text very often doesn't quite match what the voice actors are saying, as well as some lines having only text and no voice, seemingly at random points, and some lines even seem to be missing from the game entirely. All these flaws combine to continually pull you out of the game world and lead to a stilted and unsatisfying story. I'm hoping the modern-day sequel will iron out these issues, because I'd like to get a fuller experience that lives up to this game world's potential.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I didn't find this game terribly engaging. The difficulty seems too hard, where upgrades cost far more than you can realistically gather in a mission and so your guns are constantly underpowered and make it even harder to kill enemies and get money, and the plot seems to be mostly hard-to-follow gibberish (I completed the first chapter and was greeted with... some kind of head impaled on a weird alien stake? What did that have to do with anything??) I do appreciate the variety of weapons and enemies, but I don't find it fair or fun to get through a long stage of shooting performing flawlessly, only to have the end stage boss that takes up 75% of the screen ram into you and kill you in one hit in a way you can't avoid unless you were lucky enough to already be moving in the opposite direction. It seems like most of the five star reviews are fueled by nostalgia from playing it when they were younger, and hey, good for them, and good for GOG for giving it away free, but it's definitely not for everyone.
A free 90s point and click with the premise of a teen secret agent? You'd expect it to be cheap-looking, excessively easy, stupidly childish, or all three, but it's actually a pretty fun game that has detailed graphics for the time, some really tricky puzzles and a plot and dialogue that, while not hilarious, is fun and charming enough to keep you playing. It's a decent length for a free game, too. The only downside is that the puzzles walk a fine line between hard enough to make you think and insane moon logic that you'll only figure out by trying to use everything on everything. If you get really stuck somewhere, just consult a walkthrough, because the game isn't giving you some hint somewhere that you missed, it just expects you to do something random that you couldn't have predicted. Luckily, those moments are relatively rare and you can get through most of the rest of the game using your own wits and creativity. If you're a fan of the point and click adventure genre, this is a solid entry that's worth trying out.
