The good: What’s the game like? It’s a nice 2D side scroller which happens to have an ok fighting and shooting mechanic. The story has enough depth for at least 2 play throughs – one to do the main campaign and a second to complete all the side missions. Now is the game as well written as something like Deus Ex Human Revolution? No it’s not as well written, the story is much shorter and the ever present movie sudo technical talk is present (it will annoy you if you’ve studied IT). But what is here is well executed and a lot of fun to play. The story length is about as long as all the missions that take place in the China level in Deus Ex Human Revolution. Like Deus Ex there is a lot of reading emails you managed to pull of peoples computing devise – this adds to the unaverse building and helps you figure out new secrets. There is a quick save option which you can use any time to save your progress which you’ll want to use as you can get stuck in places if you run out of resources. Running out of resources only happens if you suck at playing the game like I do – I don’t often play 2D side scrollers so I’m not very good at them. The music is well designed and adds to the atmosphere. You’ll want to turn up the audio level for the dialogue because the music tends to overpower it. The bad I did notice a scaling issue where the pixel art was a little stretched – I am running a 16/10 monitor. The story and game play just start to get really enjoyable and then the game ends - your left with a “I want to see more” feeling. This wouldn’t be so bad if there was a new game plus mode. As I tend to build all-rounder characters in RPG’s I didn’t get access to some of the abilities until close to the end game. Hacking turrets and cameras can be frustrating – you get swamped by the anti-intrusion enemies. Most of the time I just avoided trying to hack the turrets and cameras because it was way too difficult. This was a mistake because you need to be able to hack turrets and cameras in the end game or you won’t be able to preceded. What makes this worse is that your given a part tutorial for the computer hacking and not one for the hacking of turrets and cameras. Conclusion: All up is a fun game. It’s not perfect but I can forgive it because most of the time it is fun and the story was really good. If you plan on getting it get on GOG and not steam because the GOG version comes with all the DLC and a lot more goodies.
The game looks stunning and plays much better than the old one. They have streamlined the FPS controls and game play to the point where I feel like the controls are not the reason I died. The inventory sill fells clunky to navigate and I hope they will fix this in the final version of the game. The art style if faith full to the original - It sits somewhere in between the original and a late DX9 game like the original bioshock. The one major problem I had is that everything is baked in blue coloured lighting which gives me a migraine after a short time of playing (because one of my right eyes is missing 10% blue)
