I love the game, going back down memory lane and playing this title again. But there's a jetpack glitch in level 3 where you cannot cross the chasms withtout the jetpack upgrade and if you need to use a continue there you may as well restart the whole level because the jetpack won't respawn and you're stuck. And I've gotten past the chasms twice and been sent back to a continue and can't so I'm just stuck on the stage.
I didn't know what I wanted to play exactly, but I knew I wanted an RPG. I was scanning my backlog and there this gem was. I can't tell you how many times I passed over it thinking of the limitation of the graphics and odd setting. But when I sat down with it, it gave the RPG experience I didn't know I was wanting. It felt like someone programmed a D&D campaign in an entirely different setting and made it a turn-based game for me. It was a delight from beginning to end, looking forward to playing the other games I have in the backlog, but I'm not rushing I want to savor each story.
This game appeared to be a nice adventure game with some puzzles and a dark illuminati-like theme. It delivered on this and went beyond. It delivered a solid story with a solid number of options. Dialogue choices did matter and having a time crunch for some was nice, added to the tension appropriately. I play games like this for the story far more than the gameplay because I'm not the greatest lover of puzzles. But the game provided enough aids and skills to complete them that I rarely felt like I was doing something I couldn't achieve. Going deeper into the world one step at a time was most certainly enjoyable and I believe this will be worth a replay in full to make some early choices differently. I didn't have to go back terribly far to see the endings I was most interested in so that was a pleasant surprise with its limiting save system. I definitely rate this as worth buying when on sale.
This game had a lot of negative press, for good reason in my opinion, upon release. I'm already reluctant to buy games outside of GOG because I love my DRM-free access and this one gave me more reasons to avoid it. But I had heard enough people rave about how unique an experience it was, how good the graphics were, that when it came to GOG it piqued my interest enough to talk to a friend about it. They gifted it to me and I tell you what, it would've been worth it if I had spent my own money on it. In depth story line with tons of side content in this Ultimate edition release. Some main line DLCs can take hours to do on their own. I did every main side quest and the vast majority of the small stuff. I struggle with some boss battles so my time will likely be more inflated than yours if you make your playthrough as exhaustive as mine, but I can tell you that if you do, you will be well over the 15 hour average. The gameplay is fun and you generally will have more than one way to skin a cat. Skill tree is pretty straight forward and the weapon and personal mods do a solid job enabling the way that you prefer to play, but I don't recall being able to switch out mod groupings. The gameplay was enjoyable and rewards being a more skilled combatant the majority of the time. But being overleveled can compensate for a lot. HERE IS MY BIGGEST POINT: The game world is immersive, every answer you get leads to more questions, especially with so many of the files being redacted. Learning about Jesse's history, the history of the Bureau, the nature of AWEs, OOPs, and altered items was so intriguing to me. The lore is what makes this game, no question. It felt lovingly crafted. The story is one that feels routine when you focus on the main quest, but it does integrate many established archetypes well, it certainly wasn't haphazard. But I must emphasize again, allowing yourself to get sucked in by the lore of this game world will make it one that you don't want to leave.
I came into this looking for an XCOM style of experience. In a number of ways I received that. I got the home base, characters that go through different experiences, permadeath, research. However, in many others I got a very odd experience that didn't gel. Dossiers didn't make much sense in terms of how I interacted with them, it just seemed like an almost pointless clicking mini-game that wasn't even a game. Stealth was not much to speak of unless you can sneak up on someone with no witnesses or cameras, no silenced weaponry in the early game. And when I did manage to pull off a perfect in and out mission, including secondary objectives, without having to fire a gun that was in the main storyline it wasn't reflected in the dialogue that took place afterward which really hollowed out the experience for me. It does do some cool things, like multiple ways of completing research, figuring out how to deal with potentially back-stabbing agents, and solid customizability. The part that lead to me quitting so early in my gameplay experience was the a bug I encountered repeatedly. In a seemingly random fashion, I would choose to open fire on an enemy and the animation would freeze with my character pointing a gun at them and about to fire and never doing it. And it would stick there. This happened at least twice and the only remedy I could get was to exit the mission and come back. When I had already completed the objectives and was just getting into evac it was the last straw. The fact that I didn't even care enough about the story or the gameplay experience to seek what forums had to say tells me and hopefully should tell you enough that this game isn't worth the time. Go play XCOM again.
The gameplay was quite enjoyable knowing it wasn't going to be the most complex system created. The story was building up to be far better than I thought, but I ran into the infamous Petrescu glitch and halted all my progress in the game. So this is making me reluctant to look into other games from this developer because this is a known problem with no known fix. The present narrative is that the dev has abandoned the game. So I'm leaving this review so others aren't caught unaware as I was.
