First of all the good things. The voice acting is amazing, the sound effects are the highlight of the game and the locations look really attractive. It is visually very appealing game up today. Secondly, the game like Thief absolutely needs to have a good story and interesting missions. Unfortunately the story in Metal Age is weak. It is just a plain bad supervillain story. The main villan is so ridiculous that he could be as well Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. So I wasn't really invested in it at all and that is a big problem because without a good story it is just a pointless looting. Another issue is the enourmous size of some missions with a lot of backtracking. What starts as immersive often turns into tedious with and looses all of its tension and you just want to desperately finish it. There are some really awfully designed tedious mission like Shipping... and Receiving with a huge warehouse that should not be in the game at all. At the end of the game you go to the same not so interesting building in two separate missions which is just boring from the very start the second time. The best missions are in the middle of the game from 4 (Ambush) till 10 (Life of the Party) and suddenly the game is really fun but then it goes again downhill. So in the end just half of the missions are good and the rest of them suffer from various issues (annoying music that you cant turn off being one of them in otherwise decent mission called Framed), It is just not as good as its predecessor but I would still recommend the game for the good missions. The bad ones, just skip them if you get bored.
The core of the game is excellent but except nice graphics and combat there is really nothing much too offer. The story is weak if you can call it even a story and it is also a linear game so do not expect any side quests. It is only a matter of time before it will turn from fun to chore. For me it was few chapters too long and it was quite tedious at the end. If you experience troubleshooting try to use dgVoodoo2. It surely sorted my issues with screen and mouse flicking.
Fun little game with a very a limited number of tracks that are more or less copy pasted and sometimes just inverted. The good thing is it is quite satisfying to learn to handle the cars especially on professional difficulty. The cheapest car is the hardest to handle while the most expensive is way easier. You will want to improve your tires and thus traction as your first modification in the game. They only overdid it with the AI hostility. The other cars often prefer to ruin your day instead of trying to win the race themself. When they are behind you they will try to hit you from the back and spin you and they will often succeed in that. If they crash in front of you, they wil intentionally get right in your way while getting back on the track. Sometimes they just completely "forget" it is a race and go after you to slow you down even.
The game is likely designed for gamepads in mind and with keyboard you won't have much fun. You activate running by pressing "w" key two times in a row and there is no strafing in the game. Who thought this was a good idea? The controls are just awful. Get Rune instead.
The game looks nice and I have no issue with dumb AI. It just requires restraint from you so you don't play it like a shooter but it has so many other problems. What really bothers me is the lack of options. There is usually only one specific way how to eliminate your target. It needs more ideas. Another thing is a lack of interactivity. NPCs behave more like lifeless robots than humans and therefore the maps feel dead even though there are plenty of NPCs everywhere but they don't talk and they just repeat the same tasks. Well, some of them talk only to give you a hint how to finish the mission or tell you where not to go. That is all. You get this empty feeling like if you were testing an unfinished game. It really looks like a game that was released in its development.
If you like 80's action movies with badass main protagonist and cliched plots you will enjoy this one. There are some flaws like slow motion mechanic that is pretty much useless and enemies with pin point accuracy but it is a very short game and it will never get too annoying.
