Count 8h in average difficulty (Bring 'em on!) doing most extra nightmare mission, it is quite short. But it is well done. The weapons are fun and powerful, the story consistent and the ambiance perfect if you remember Wolfenstein 3D, probably very good nonetheless if you don't - a mix of dystopian/WWII-epic movie (think The Guns of Navarone) . The map are obviously less of a maze than in Wolfenstein 3D but that's what you expect from an FPS in 2020 (I'm not sure mazes Wolfenstein/Doom-like would make sense with how detailled is the environment map now).
I was wary about the lack of overwatch feature (and, no, the IA does not get it, more like a defensive overwatch if you get in contact with them), turns out it makes the gameplay quite different than X-Com and clones so it is actually a good thing. I was as well weary about the whole supernatural angle of the story but it is well done, consistent. And some game mechanics is different depending on the scenario. So, even though the game contains a few noticeables bugs (half of the UI disappearing, etc) it is enjoyable.
Finished in about 25h, still wondering about replayability, I must say the hype around Disco Elysium is deserved. Dialogs, graphic, that's something else, top of the moment. And the gameplay is some sort of point-and-click reborn, simple and nonetheless complex.
It is a short game. I finished it in around 4 hours. I was afraid the story would develop into something very simplistic at some point but it did not. It is well written, dialogue are fine, voice fine, graphics good in their style. Sure, I have my reservations about how the story could branch depending on choices being made - probably more tailoring, to use the words of the Telltale good era. But it is nice to follow the story unfolding.
Innovative gameplay, well-written plots and dialogs, great graphics - and historically consistent. Bug free. Totally worth it. Ignore "reviews" of persons that haven't play the game, or think they know abouty french Revolution but does not understand how the people can be treated as a separate entity from the leaders of the Revolution, or havent played more than a few minutes and have complains about the role-playing dimension being railroaded. It is not really a role-playing game, you are not who you'd like to be. You are a certain character and you can proceed with the story only by making sure you do not get kill. This can be achieved by making different decisions but often it wont be dictacted by what you'd like personally but by the context. That is the point. You cannot be a judge in a terror era and just fart around willy-nilly.
It is easy to get into Dawn of Man and play about 10 hours. Time pass without notice. But then it looks that everything possible to do was done, and without much effort. Wondering about the replay value, especially with the other said "challenging" modes. Also, while the game mechanics are convenient with a small crowd, when you have more than 100 people, it get to simplistic to make sense. You get no way to really prioritise tasks, but even your crowd does not. You would assume that people does not forget to eat or produce food. Aside from that, I've read comments mentioning bugs or crashes. I had none.
The overall ambiance of the game makes it worth it, especially if you like 80's style espionnage. The games progress interestingly. There is a major flaw though, tactical/combat part are way to repetitive: the nature and objectives of the mission are really too similar all the time (unlike in recent XCOMs), it is just a matter of how many persons you need to eliminate or not. Plus the interesting ability to disguise makes it easy in many case to stay in infiltration mode (no combat, hostiles havent detected your activity as such), so it is a bit easy. Finally, the tactictal user interface reminds me of the release of Skyrim: it needs to be patched, in many cases you are requiring to click many times, just to put a unit in overwatch for instance. So the game is fine but the tactical part should clearly be patched and improved.
Last time I checked, the mechanics were completely broken by design. The proximity from your starting points to some businesses was the main game changer, making multiplayer completely pointless. There is not much strategy. Besides, it was riddled with bugs - some were tied to the horrendous DRM software it was tied to, but not only. So, despite the ambiance looks much like The Sopranos series (so, good!), the gameplay is too bad to recommend this game, even on a sale, because it'll get really frustrating.
