Disclaimer: I immediately went into the highest difficulty setting. With the difficulty set to deadeye (highest) the game offers a simple sniper experience on nice large (enough) maps. It doesn't take you by the hand, just 5 big maps, a few objectives and approximate area's of where to complete them. You are faced with plenty of enemy's that can easily surprise you at times, you have to be tactical and patient to find ways to kill everyone without raising any alarms (too soon), and you could die within a second if you make a bad choice. There are no manual saves so a mistake can cost you significant progress. The first two maps of this game (at this difficulty setting) can be relentless and they kept me on the edge of my seat. That was my main experience te first two maps, but then things changed a bit, I got a little too familiar with the NPC a.i. and it became easy to abuse it, the added unlockable gimmicks are too effective and in the end it almost gets easy to wipe out whole bases of enemies, even at max difficulty setting. I like the basis for this game, but would have preferred they stuck to the simple sneaking and tactics of the beginning of the game rather than becoming overpowered as is the case now. Overall satisfied though, i finished the game and was sad it was over.
I loved this game and played it more than any other game back in those days. It has a great storyline/lore. The only reason I've not given it five stars is because it's quite dated by now, but i'd recommend any fan of the newer Diablo style games to buy this and they will enjoy it for sure. :)
This game is so incredibly good that even though they just released a third version of this game the first one remains to be the best and i still play it on a regular basis. If you like RPG you HAVE to play this game.
