It's a weird one. Spy game with tactical and strategic layer. In strategic layer you keep an eye on world map, dispatch agents, find&target enemy cells and seek&destroy their operations. You also manage and upgrade your base, solve investigation board minigame etc. In tactical layer, you manually control a team of agents to accomplish some objective(typically 'go and use X thing' or 'neutralise Y targets'). You start in infiltration mode, and if you break it by for example getting seen in secured area or enemy discovering a body, you get into combat mode with constant enemy reinforcements(so you are incentivized to finish missions stealth'ely, but as long as you can complete the objective it doesnt really matter if you triggered the alarm). Its a weird game because if you choose, you can play it in extremly boring and frustrating fashion, and if you do you will probably die from boredom and uninstall it after few hours. Thats how i felt anyway, but thankfully i did some research before i completly gave up. A lot of very cool stuff is hidden in plain sight. Interrogation facility unlocked in early-mid game being the most obvious one, but combining breach with silenced guns for fast and stealthy room/corridor clears is not quite so obvious. And that bio engineering facility that you unlock early on, and feels useless then? Yeah in mid-end game, with right usage you can basically create super-humans that WILL breeze through any mission with ease. Early on, you are encouraged to full-clear maps for every piece of intel and equipment(and it takes FOREVERR) but its really only necesary at the start, the further you get the less important those extra goodies are and once i realised it felt refreshing to just do a quick 'get in, complete objective, get out' without worrying about searching every locker on the map. tl;dr: Great game but you NEED to play smart and use/abuse game systems or it will feel like a chore.
