I love the ideas the devs had with this game, but it seems like the project was so massive that they didn't implement successfully half of the features. Hello, lvl curves: Skills in this game work in a similar way TES handles them. Except for one thing, in most scenarios (starts) you start with ones in all skills and unfortunately they don't do anything until at least level 15. Usually even 30. Why did devs decide to not let you choose a boost in, lets say, 3 skills? It's a complete mystery to me. You will still level up most of them rather quickly until 10 in vanilla. So what comes with it? Start of the game: How about an economy where player actually doesn't need the money? Why? Because you can literally steal everything. Get in the tower shop, hide behind the shelves to the left of the enterance and steal-drop-steal-.. nearby items until you got lvl 50+ (can be done on day 1). That's it. You won't need money for the rest of the game. Not for the trading purposes. And then you just run around town for 3-5 days in stealth so you can lvl it up. Sounds fun, doesn't it? And you need it, because travelling without stealth is dangerous. When does the action start? Not anytime soon. Because now you need to get all defenses up. By doing same kind of tedium. This game is Runescape on steroids. The World: It's empty. Especially in the southern parts. Travelling through the world, you will see gigantique robot hands sticking out of the mud, cannibal villages and robots with outfits made from flayed human skin, but does the game do anything with these assets right there, when you discover them? No. Literally nothing. You might have a small dialogue prompt only when you enter a region and it might have nothing to do with the POI you just saw. Most of the regions don't even have that. Also, any NPC can be made into a slave. Sounds fun, right? No. It breaks immersion. Put the Warden of the prison in a cell and they will be turned into a slave too. Nice NPC interaction there.
While this game definitely does have an interesting visual atmosphere the gameplay is nothing that impressive and in fact, has severe flaws: 1. Side quests are awful. When there is a point doing them in the first campaign, in the second balance is so off that you just get bombarded with skill points and will get every OP perk in first quarter/third of the playthrough. But that's not the main problem, quests are boring and sometimes lazy to a point "come back at night tomorrow" 5 times and that's it. I am not even joking. If I'm not mistaken that quest is called Awkward Courtesy. 2. There's absolutely no point in differing takedowns to non-lethal/kills. Why? Because NPCs don't wake up in this game no matter what. If you knocked them out (made them unconscious), they will lie there for a couple of hours and then just die. So much for a pacifist run just to know 4 hours in that NPCs still die. Why bother and use non-lethal weapons? Exactly, no point. Pick whatever the weapon's best. 3. Perks are unbalanced and some design decisions are questionable: e.g. You can't run in the main districts unless you have a perk (well, you can, but everybody would get angry at you and they will start chasing you). Why would you want to limit player movement so much? And these districts aren't small. And I dropped the game on the third campaign just because of character traits. He has an innate passive that reduces his movement speed by 20% and he doesn't have the Stealth branch, so he will always have to slowly jog around these districts. Good job, that's one of the worst design decisions I've seen yet. 4. Combat and stealth are not challenging at all: I played on a custom difficulty (combat+enemy alertness on the hardest and needs on the easiest). Combat was easy because you can never die, you always have a bunch of medkits which are easy to use mid-combat. Stealth is the most broken in terms of saving time. Don't want to have a lame fight with a pack of NPCs? Just use distraction and choke them out even when they're like 4-5 ft away from each other. And yeah, they won't wake up others, but rather just stare at their dead bodies and just wait for you to takedown them. 5. Size of the map: All campaigns take place in one city and happen almost at the same time, within the same districts. But every time you finish the campaign the city is generated again. Why? Not to mention that cutscenes have some differences in interactions between the characters but they have no impact on the ending. Why not just make a fixed city instead. It would've probably been better even if it was 3-4 times smaller, the world is too huge anyway. Streets are basically empty (except for pointless NPCs) First 5 hours of gameplay were good but shortly after, I started understanding what matters in this game and what doesn't. It completely ruined my gameplay experience. I played through the second campaign only for the story.
