On my Gigabyte G5 with RTX3060, this game starts but it's mostly black screen with some small dots of more lit graphic artifacts of some sort, they all, as poorly visible as they are, form some sort of scene, that much is discernable - but this seems to run at 1 frame / 10 seconds or something, and can't do anything, and then after seconds it proclaims you died. I did set up initially, the brightness according to the instructions, but as bright as some of the weird spots are (nothing like the rendernigs here on the GOG site for the game, where you can actually see properly rendered things), it can't be too low brightness, which also doesn't explain the abysmal FPS (more like SPF). Given how modestly this game is spec'd HW wise, this should not be expected. I have not had such weird issues with a dozen other games from GOG on that laptop.
I didn't remember, when buying, that this has a non-optional inverted mouse Y axis for "mouse look", i.e. implementing airplane logic, which is inappropriate for this type of game & thus unplayable for me. (even in the 1990s there were plenty games whose developers had more sense...) The FOV is also ridiculously small such that everything looks like you have a binocular glued to your face, but that's a thing that even today many don't get right, although it's not rocket science... The remaining aspects of the game could be as great as can be - if it's not playable due to stupid limitations of input mapping (there are probably more I didn't care to find out), it ruins everything.
... as far as games go, This is supposed to be a throwback game, right? Old-school FPS. Who is _most_ likely to play it? Currently 14 year olds who are used to bad staples of contemporary game design? No. People who can be "thrown back" because they knew the old games back in the day. I.e. people who likely have a job, maybe family, maybe even other hobbies! And on top of that, people who have seen a lot of this kind of stuff. And you know what people like that don't need at all? To play whole levels of a game over and over because they were slightly inattentive for a microsecond, while acing the gameplay the rest of the time even on hard difficulty (and easy setting would be too boring most of the time). Not to mention that, in old games we wish to be thrown back to, SAVEGAMES WERE A STANDARD FEATURE. ANd not even just a few slots, actually, unliminted savegames were more common especially in the early days of FPS. We don't care whether anyone considers it "cheating". It is a method of not playing stuff yuo've already seen over and over, as opposed to just the part that you actually failed at. Checkpoints, or whole levels to be played over, are a DUMB idea and none of us has time for this nonsense. Which means after half an hour of playtime and a couple levels until death of the player character, this thing gets uninstalled from the laptop and I get to see 1/10 or worse of what I bought for no really good reason. That's not acceptable.
Guess what a real high number multiplied with zero is? Right. Zero. Another game that could be good ruined by willfully ignorant game designers, needlessly. Which is why I give this zero stars, even though it will erroneously show as 1 star. Solved for >25 years by physiology and math, some game makers continue to prefer to cobble together something until it adheres to their warped (no pun) aesthetic perception, with utter disregard for pesky things like ergonomics. "Artists" in ivory towers. This is not just subjective taste, even though some game addicts will ignore it and get used to straining their eyes. The Field of View angle is unrealistically low, a lot, in this game, not adjustably. My 16:10 screen is less wide than average, so it's not just a problem for extra-wide-screen owners. This produces the impression of you running around with a zoom objective glued to your face all the time. The unnatural viewing experience is very straining on the eyes and probably even unhealthy. Now the responsible sadists (producing a visually nice title but punishing you for looking at it) may argue all day long this is a "third person cam" and therefore need not have a natural FOV. Which would be silly, as playing such a game is still a human being exploring a world using direct camera orientation and movement controls, but happens to look at the rendered player character from a somewhat distant camera (which would, for sensible people, mean that the FOV was even wider, i.e. zoomed more OUT, not in, to see both the 3rd person player character with some distance and the surroundings.) Gameplay: Someone commented this title deviated from predecessors by requiring more stealth and more realism in that regard. That must then only hold true for higher difficulty than "normal", as I just played through a bunch of checkpoints like it was an action shooter without any trouble - other than the quickly accumulating eye strain, for which this is now removed from my system again.
Teasers made this look more interesting than it is. I fondly remembered games such as "Outlaws", which had a horridly outdated gfx engine when it came out, but nice atmosphere, (Italo-)Western music and humor. This game, and I tried* to play only for a few hours, is a pretty dull "rail shooter" of sorts, well not literally, but it feels just as dull. "run to point A and shoot!". "Now run to point B and shoot". I know that these days a lot of games have *some* of that aspect, but they're not all like it's pretty much all there is to the "game", which then isn't really a game by any sensible definition, but a list of stupid chores. And while the graphics look decent, the suggested pace and scope of your movements and stuff to do don't really invite their enjoyment. * (tried, because the insanely narrow, totally unnatural Field Of View, which makes you feel like running around with a zoom objective glued to your face all the time, is straining your visual system, which can only be changed with a 3rd party mod which also changes all sorts of other things you may not want to change (the "Realism Mod"))
2 Stars for nice looks. I can't play this game. It's too annoying to bother. 1) controls are just broken. I hit the D key for 1 microsecond, the character moves 3 miles to the right, oops... The coordination of camera + controls doesn't really work. (I play with keyboard + mouse. No, I will not play a game like that with gamepad. I could have bought a console if I wanted inferior controls. Gamepads are for racing & flying games and such, where analog joysticks make sense...) 2) Follower Camera was apparently programmed by a summer intern and not reviewed... 3) Too small Field Of View angle. A mistake frequently made, I'm note sure why. But also not giving an option for it, if you must use a crappy, unrealistic preset, smells. This strains the eyes, and if endured long enough, induces head ache. 4) Hints interrupt gameplay flow like punching you in the face, every few seconds! I didn't find an option to disable them. 5) Linearity The gameplay feels mindnumblingly linear. It's basically like if you're watching a video, where you have to press some knobs all the time to make the sequence go on. A video with very bad camera work, that is. (I played only about half an hour, maybe this changes at some point? I doubt it. Would try longer if it weren't for the other annoyances.)
