I really liked the puzzles in this game, for the most part. There are only 3 puzzles with unintuitive or poorly sign-posted solutions. This is par for the course, unless your game is being designed by a genius chess-master. At first I thought the gunfights were just a dumb arcade action-sequences, but then I looked a little closer and realized each one was a little puzzle. You need to figure out how many shots the bad guys have, how long it takes them to reload. This gets very complicated as the game throws larger groups of bad guys at you, all firing asynchronously. It's a small part of the game, but very well implemented. There's very little color in this game. The cold, lifeless environments do a great job of reinforcing the themes of the game's parallel story arcs: a grim detective drama about an ex-assassin/war veteran searching the rainy slums of planet Barracus for his brother, and a sci-fi thriller about a John Doe attempting to escape from the bowels of a futuristic super-prison. The game's sterile hallways and rainy slums reminded me a lot of Cowboy Bebop. The inspiration shows, since characters from that show can be found as easter eggs if you go looking off the beaten path. There are actually a surprising number of pop culture references to the point where I found myself being taken out of the experience by them. It's most jarring towards the end when characters start beginning every sentence with "Would you kindly." The last thing I need to address is the writing. The plot is fantastic, but the dialogue within the plot has a lot of room for improvement. This game does not require street smarts from you, and there are times when you have to say things that would get you killed in real life, just to move the plot forward. And towards the end characters will start waxing philosophical with no regards for subtlety or voice. Everyone turns into a philosopher for no reason. Despite it's shortcomings, get it. This is a unique adventure and well worth your time
I've played this game for five hours and I'm now uninstalling it. I bought it on sale and installed the patch. When it works it's wonderful. There are moments in this game that play like the sense/net heist from neuromancer. But the flaws are so frustrating. I can't deal with it anymore. When I ran the game I noticed a lot of slow down when I zoomed the camera all the way out. So I turned off all the video effects and set the video quality to "low." That didn't fix the slowdown. Then I started noticing the bugs. -Tool-tips will pop up and stay on the screen forever. -Whenever I scroll, my cursor changes modes. When I left-clicked on a civillian thinking my cursor was still in scan mode, my agents all pulled their guns out and shot her to death, right in front of the cops. -Agents will stop moving when I use the scroll keys. If I tell my agents to walk to a faraway position I can't scroll away to view a different part of the map, because my agents will stop walking. -Agents' pathfinding+behavior is inconsistent and unintuitive. They'll sprint when I tell them to walk, take unpredictable paths to reach positions right next to them. -The interface is bad. I had to figure out how the cloning system worked all on my own, and the tutorial actually made it more confusing. It skipped over important steps. -Because of the unreliable controls, I decided to scumsave in the middle of a mission, but the game hadn't explained the rules of manual saving I wasn't allowed to save while trespassing. My agent spazzed out, got spotted and died, and I had to reload an hour-old autosave. -Party members can't trade equipment while trespassing. This isn't a bug, it's just dumb. If I want my support to trade his sniper rifle for the hacker's UZI they should be able to do that if they're right next to eachother. But no! they have travel to a beacon, which they can't do if they're in an enemy base, surrounded by unaware guards and drones.
