This was one of the earlier open-world games, and it really delivered the goods. Having each section of the city get progressively brighter and more colorful as you slowly liberate it works great and is very satisfying. Like the Just Cause series, the map is loaded with tons of interactive "events", and while they do get repetitive, many of them force you to consider new strategic possibilities. In the early part of the game, targets are easy to sneak up to, and hiding places are always pretty close. In the later game, many of the targets you encounter require some planning to sneak into and set charges without being seen. That said, it's perhaps a little too easy to just ignore stealth entirely and go in guns blazing, destroy the target, then run away and hide. I certainly found the game much more interesting by challenging myself to finish eash area without being noticed. Here and there I found targets that I absolutely could not figure out how to sneak into, so it's good that a "louder" approach still works. Overall, it's a less polished open-world game than more recent Assassin's Creed games, but it's still quite appealing. The milieu is great, the recreation of Paris is great, and there are plenty of cool things to discover and collect along the way. Well worth your time!
This is my favorite kind of game: short, clever and packed with ideas. It's a wholly unique gameplay mechanism paired with a wholly unique rendering engine, all combined to make about 5-8 hours of absorbing game. The basic idea is that a ship, long thought to be lost, shows up again in Falmouth harbor, and you need to figure out what happened to the 60 crew and passengers. To that end, you have a mysterious stopwatch that will allow you to see the moment of each crew members' deaths in frozen time, while you can walk around the scene and examine things from various angles, look for clues, etc. The game strikes a great balance with the difficulty: it doesn't hold your hand, and some of the deductions are pretty hard, but with perseverance essentially anyone should be able to complete the game. If you end up guessing a bit, you're in good company. Every answer can be figured out from the clues given, but a few of the clues are very obscure, so in some cases eliminating some of the possibilities and then making some educated guesses may be your best option. Definitely a milestone in gaming, and really a game that is not to be missed.
The story in this game is fairly good, certainly a cut above most adventure game stories. Yes, the story takes an odd twist near the end, but surprisingly I didn't find it that jarring. The gameplay, though, is heavily reliant on its own style of timed analog stick movements. The problem is that there are huge, potentially exciting chase sequences and fight scenes with Matrix-style wire fu, but you the player are staring at a set of colored markers that tell you how to move the sticks in sequence to not die. The conversation interface is annoying. There is a time limit for asking a question, for no good reason except to "add tension." There may be four different topics you can talk to a person about, but the game might only let you ask two of the topics before your player character says, "OK, that's all I wanted to know." Several of the special motions you need to do are pretty easy with an analog stick control like a PS2 controller, but hard with a mouse. My advice is to get a PS2->USB adapter and an actual PS2 controller. Then go into the controller customization screen to get the right stick configured. If you want to experience the game, print out a walkthrough guide and keep it next to your computer. Refer to it constantly when you get frustrated (which will be often). This will keep you reasonably sane.
