Playing through the first area, the canyon over a lazy sunday for about 8 hours and I was hooked, fun action and stealth with a good art style and interesting story. Getting into the second region the swamps and issues start cropping up as there is a massive difficulty spike and ran into a bug that despawned NPCs and enemies. While resting brought the NPCs back I had a feeling that some of the more challenging enemies never came back. I also had a bug where some of my arrows went straight through and enemy without doing damage. Overall the stealth is fairly fun but the gunplay is punishing, its trying to do both a stealthy imsim and a boomer shooter and I dont think either works great, I wish they had focused on one playstyle instead of being stuck in the middle. I will likely come back to this but I encourage you to wait for a sale unless you have patience with some jank.
Playing in 20 years after release I was surprised how much this held up. Atmosphere, music and some of the social aspects are extremely great, you even have solid dialogue animations for most NPCs. The first third of playing this game I was floored and surprised that there have been very limited spiritual successors... Then you get into level 3/5 of the Hollywood Sewers and its still going. Combat is bad and most of the boss battles are as well. Starts to show issues at around the half-way point and the last few hours are just dungeon after dungeon with little to no respect for the levels you put into social skills or your decisions that were so rewarding in the first parts of the game. Some characters are great, others just jiggle at you in a pandering way that shows its age slightly. Overall I still liked this game with its warts and I am starting to think that the upcoming sequel cant tarnish this game as much as it did itself. Even just ending slides would have improved quite a bit on this. Its on sale often enough that if you have a fairly quiet week you can beat the game in about 25 hours and have fun during most of it. If nothing else it will make you look for a World of Darkness tabletop group to join as the setting is extremely rich.
