The game has all the hallmarks of a bad adventure game: bad story, cringe dialogues, cliched characters, awful fake accents, illogical puzzles, cumbersome interface for its time, lots and lots of long-winded boring cut-scenes and a disappointing "to be continued" at the end.
After giving this a try now and again over the course of decades without making much progress I just finished the game following a walkthrough in about 2 and a half hours. The art is great and features some cool animations (for its time) and the voice overs are well done but the gameplay? It's a chore. Obtuse puzzles, hunting down ingredients, tedious brewing mechanics where order matters, possible dead ends, random death traps reminiscent of old Sierra games and inventory management, because you only have 20 slots, which is actually more than you need most of the time but is a horrible limitation if you do not already know what you need. The story is also very thin and not awfully interesting and the last portion of the game forgoes classic point and click gameplay for a potion brew-a-thon, playing towers of (h)anoi twice and finally randomly clicking on the screen in a die-repeat loop until you find the right spots. I understand people remembering this fondly but without the nostalgia it has little worth beyond mere curiosity.
The combat feels good and turning your characters into omega level threats is fun but ultimately the game is laughably easy on normal. Almost all ancounters ended in 1 turn oncluding bosses unless a mechanic demanded otherwise. End of game damage stats for my 3 characters by order of initiative: 300k, 100k, 6k. Final boss? 1 turn kill. The tinkering with cards and items is fun, but the skill grid is needlessly complicated and random, the loot is bad (maximum values go up in late game but minimum remains the same, legendaries are mostly useless), the explorer minigame is a chore and when you pick a starter deck for a character you will have to stick with that strategy for a very long time and it will cost a lot to change it taking out a lot of the flexibility. But again, combat is fun and with 10 characters with 4 starting decks each there's a lot of variability.
Good stealth/action game with a heavy cyberpunk theme and great synth music.
Wetlands is an FMV based on rails shooter like Rebel Assault or Creature Shock where all you do is move your cursor and shoot at things and watch videos of the story unfolding. It's fairly short with about 1.5 hours running time if you ace every level on the first try (good luck with that) but it has good (for its time) animation and prerendered 3D cutscenes that deliver a nice sci-fi B-movie. The problem, as so often with these games however, is the bad controls and some bad design choices. You can play with eithe mouse (default for gog) or joystick (enter "install" on the dos prompt after quitting the game to change) but 19 out of 20 levels are impossible with joystick and 2 out of 20 are impossible with mouse, so you will have to change to joystick controls for that one mission and then switch back and just cheat on the final one or risk getting carpal tunnel. Unfortunately there are two levels that require guessing without any hints whatsoever and if you guess wrong two or three times you have to start over, which isn't horribly bad if you are lucky enough, then it just adds to the adrenaline, but utterly effed up if you guess wrong repeatedly (search youtube for a playthrough if you need help). Overall it's still a fun shooter with lots of style that's easy to pick up and ridiculously difficult to finish even on the lowest difficulty setting. And thanks for bringing it back. After I sold my copy about 20 years ago I kept wanting to go back and finally finish it which I now did with help from youtube and cheat engine.
The game is beautiful for its age and the main protagonists are charming enough. The parkour part is mostly nice and fluent. But the horrible camera, imprecise controls and questionable combat mechanics make it a tedious experience. Automatic camera jumps will make you change direction at crucial times, and the controls will often make your character do things you do not want him to do, especially in combat. Also, whose brilliant idea was it to make a 3 second animation mandatory for dispatching enemies on the ground? Beyond stupid! The combat is generally very bland as you constantly fight against 3 or 4 enemies. Kill one, and another joins the fight until you've taken care of all 20 to 40 enemies. That only gets exhilarating - and in a bad way- when off-camera baddies stab you in the back or your character attacks someone even though your directional input should point you in the opposite direction.
