Solid game, decent amount of content, deep skill trees and inventory/gear system. and a lot of pretty traditional swich-flicking and block-moving puzzling. Also has really fine-grained difficulty sliders, you can make timed puzzles move at half-speed, reduce damage taken to 20%, and reduce the frequency of big enemy attacks, so if you want a challenge, it's there, but you can also tailor the game to your needs. Soundtrack is really good, but the art style can be a little jarring at times (isn't always obvious what you're looking at, a lot of enemies are just a mess of muddy pixels blending in to the background, and it can be difficult to tell if a platform is on the same plane as you when trying to do platforming or puzzles where you have to shoot projectiles off walls, etc). Controls are a mixed bag. Huge credit to the dev that you can move with WASD/left stick and aim with mouse/right stick, that's a huge step up from most ARPGs still using rudimentary Diablo or Zelda controls, but combat is stil quite rough. Melee attacks ignore mouse aim/right stick and attack in the direction you're moving, not the direction you're aiming, and most attacks interrupt your movement/walking becomes very jerky when in combat. Also, you can't assign your mouse's back/forward buttons, or change the default mouse controls at all. The UI for customising controls only accepts keyboard keys as inputs.
This is a cyberpunk tale done right: a self-consistent, well-realised world operating under its own logic (no lazy deus ex machina twists, easy outs, or ad hoc contrivances so common to this genre) that doesn't hold the audience's hand and isn't too ponderous or self-impressed. It's dense, intelligent storytelling. If you can fault anything, character motivations are occasionally a tad thin (Regis' 'life begins at conception' shtick is a bit hard to swallow). Soundtrack and VO work are equally as impressive; deluxe edition is worth it just for the MP3/FLAC soundtrack. Adventure game mechanics are mostly bullshit-free. Occasionally, you'll get stuck because the game requires you to use an object in a non-intuitive way (eg. using a physical object in 'the Trance' or being expected to use 'wetware' on a corpse despite not being able to do that to anyone else, living or dead, across the first two thirds of the game). You'll also have to use Google to figure out how to get the game running in full-screen.
This is a cyberpunk tale done right: a self-consistent, well-realised world operating under its own logic (no lazy deus ex machina twists, easy outs, or ad hoc contrivances so common to this genre) that doesn't hold the audience's hand and isn't too ponderous or self-impressed. It's dense, intelligent storytelling. If you can fault anything, character motivations are occasionally a tad thin (Regis' 'life begins at conception' shtick is a bit hard to swallow). Soundtrack and VO work are equally as impressive; deluxe edition is worth it just for the MP3/FLAC soundtrack. Adventure game mechanics are mostly bullshit-free. Occasionally, you'll get stuck because the game requires you to use an object in a non-intuitive way (eg. using a physical object in 'the Trance' or being expected to use 'wetware' on a corpse despite not being able to do that to anyone else, living or dead, across the first two thirds of the game). You'll also have to use Google to figure out how to get the game running in full-screen.
