An early FPS to bring in more adventure, puzzle, and some minor RPG elements as well as a quick selection wheel to swap between weapons and abilities. Great atmosphere, graphics (for the time though still atmospheric), music, and enjoyable gameplay for the most part. The weapons are fun to use and satisfying, one of the only games where shooting a gun while touching a wall can cause to yo injure yourself from bullet ricochets and different weapons can have stronger effects on certain types of enemies. Spells can allow you to project a shield in front of yourself, haste yourself to make all of your actions faster including your mana regeneration, skyre can eventually let you see enemies through walls and health auras, attack spells let you shoot lightning and launch exploding skulls, and one of the more unique ones is one that will revive dead enemies to fight for you, kill undead enemies, or cause living enemies to kill themselves. It's nice to play a game where you can equip a spell to your off hand and where your mana to use them just regenerates over time rather than needing to manage some separate mana potion style pickups. Spells can be upgraded up to a fifth level improving their damage output and reducing mana cost but casting while holding a certain object in the left hand raises their level by one, possibly to six. Exploring locations and being able to see into the past or hidden images in portraits with the scrye spell is a great mechanic. Good story and journal entries that you will need to find and read to uncover some of the plot.
Tactical FPS, lead a five man SWAT team into some more realistic scenarios and some ridiculous ones. You end up going against cultist, a Christian anti rock group, white supremacist, and militant farmers along with some more generic robberies gone wrong or a failed assassination attempt. Lethal and nonlethal weapons and gear can be equipped to each character. You can order both teams of two separately or together and can see through a camera in your hud to see what they to a sniper team sees. Tense gameplay, though some odd decisions when it comes to needing to handcuff civilians who often don't want to surrender (I guess because they don't give you enough people to get them out of the building) requiring you to have a taser or pepper spray to make them surrender. Same odd moments when enemies refuse to drop their weapon when they are blinded or hit by gas and surrounded by your team. A lot of detail spent on each mission when it comes to the locations, briefing, environment design, and creating areas that work well with the mechanics that have changes from difficulty and randomization. Very good to very questionable AI. Expansion makes improvements when it comes to order, equipment, and an added melee button that is used more to stop the odd never surrendering situations. Anything above the easy difficulty requires you to finish a set mission with a certain score with points earned for completing it, not being wounded, not losing each member of your team, picking up all evidence and guns, reporting everything, capturing or wounding instead of killing anyone. With points lost if you injure one of the other SWAT members or injure or kill any armed suspects that aren't threatening you (or in most cases that are clearly threatening you and might have just killed multiple people, clearly not an accurate police representation. Mods can combine the main and expansion campaigns, add widescreen and 1080, add in cut content like traps, and there are player made map packs
Well written (both when it wants to be more serious or when funny) and even with the short length gives some time to John, Alan, Will, Marian, Tuck, and Much. Most every choice or action that leads to death is an obvious bad idea, and the game has you do smart things to either survive or to gain more points for a better ending (leaving a room as it was after stealing something, hiding the color of your beard). Both choices that positively effect your reputation (and score) and conversations with your men have you actively looking out for the poor or people driven to you for help. Puzzles are fair, some have worse solutions that will still work but may lead to a worse ending or less ideal result. The druid code is pretty poorly implemented though. Speed setting is nice to have.
