Haven't reached the ending yet but I can say it can be a lot of fun. The music and action sometimes gets you into a nice state of flow... sometimes the jumping and cutting also creates a sort of puzzle that is actually engaging, but it's an arcade game at the core with a relatively low cost of failure. You just respawn at the last checkpoint with any story dialogues just moving on as if you haven't just fallen into a pit or got shot from behind by a hidden enemy... and this is fine, but the game seems to count on this low cost of dying to bail it out of any real polish. Sometimes a jump requires precision that just doesn't make any sense and is mostly down to luck, often you get stuck in the environment, or have to make an extra suicide jump after missing a jump but getting stuck on an unnecessary platform... just restart the checkpoint
I really enjoyed all the action in the "real world", you move around these arenas with a lot of verticality clearing them from a few sorts of enemies that pose a bit different sort of threat to you. Everybody dies in one hit including you... and it works, mostly. I could complain about the few boss battles, which are not vary inspired and just kind of expose how straightforward the action is, but my greatest issue was the platforming. People say how they hate first person platforming all the time, but until now I never really felt the same way. I replayed both the Mirror's Edge games a couple of times, and never got even a little frustrated. Titanfall 2 is probably my all time favorite FPS and I LIKE the platforming in there. I don't like the one in Doom Eternal, but it doesn't really annoy me. This game, though... this game is trying to be a challenge there. Just throwing at you all the specific jumps that are really tough guessing the distance correctly. The game also doesn't seem to give you much leniency about jumping at the right moment, which gets really vary frustrating during the final challenge run... I died almost 400 times there, and it took me quite a long while to even figure out what I was doing wrong. I kept wondering whether the movement system just changed on me for no reason (but no, you just have to time the jump after wall-runs really well). Basically, it's really fun, but the platforming gets a bit too serious at times AND I DIDN'T ENJOY that for even a tiny bit, honestly. You get to jump across these moving platforms with red orbs flying at you seemingly at random, and I got through that mostly by luck only to do the wall-run and jump part again, that I wasn't even happy about getting through the first time, because it annoyed me too much... On the other hand, I found most of the game reasonable in difficulty, and I don't think of myself as a hardcore gamer, so it's probably worth a shot, just be ready for the bullet-hell platforming...
It's a pretty faithful remake of the original. The animations for inplants or some new equipment aren't really that annoying or common, so it's still just you playing with Shodan on the Citadel station. I think the visuals are pretty fitting at the moment, they're vary unusual, colorful, and interesting. The puzzles might get a bit annoying now, because of the controls. They don't appear in a pop up window that you can hover over with the cursor, but are actually present in the world. Some people might like that, it looks a bit better, and the wire puzzle is much easier now... not sure, if there gonna be puzzle difficulty options as were in the original. Overall I really enjoyed it, and I am definitely hyped now. Just hope they're gonna drastically improve opimization, though. Most of the demo ran relatively fine, but it got really bad by the end. I wen't into these two rooms in Beta, and pretty much lost all the framerate... luckily I had the whole floor already cleared and wanted to head straight for the elevator where the demo ends. I'm so curious about seeing the other floors now, and a working cyberspace... and getting a laser sword and the movement augmentation. Gods...
You can already tell that people generally like this game and for a good reason: it's pretty (I wonder if you could possibly be tired enough of pixel art to hate it, but I doubt it... and if so, just wait till it passes and them play it), music and sound are pretty good (I didn't actually like the music at first, but it sort of grows on you and even gets better later on)... yeah, the story with the visuals really reminds me of Final Fantasy VII, it's definitely not a regular fairytale. It has lots of humor, but quite a few drastic twists too, quite a lot of them you really won't see coming even after being warned... Now, I can't really say much negative about the gameplay... it's not repetitive exactly, each stage is somewhat different and you'll probably be delighted by some unexpected gameplay design ideas, but it gets vary arcade at times... you'll have to "learn" bosses and quite a few stages too. The game is not especially supportive of improvisation. You rarely get any health between save points. Enemies sometimes drop something, but not nearly often enough in my experience, and it quite often just get stuck somewhere where you can't reach it... I made it through most of the game on harder difficulty, but since CIty One I just really wanted it to end. Made it through every boss fight I came across, but the last challenge on way to the final boss has just too many damage-by-touch, and I grew to despise them with all my hearth and mind... yeah, it means I technically suck at this game, and my controller is probably not the best one for this, it's a real dilemma between D-pad and the left analog stick (the stick is too slow and the D-pad inaccurate)... Long story short: wonderful game... and really serious harder mode. This is probably the first game I've had to quit and watch the rest on YouTube just for the sheer difficulty in final stages (sure, could have started over on easier mode, but I really don't want to touch this again for at least a few months)...
