Edited on: September 23, 2025
Posted on: September 23, 2025
A detailed realisation of an awful city which constantly made me want to not be there. The main story/questline is incoherent and boring, with shallow characters whose main reason for existence seems to be padding. Almost the most fleshed-out person you'll meet is your doctor. Constantly having to reconfigure the graphics settings, bugs, and the noise made it an unpleasant experience in an unpleasant setting, with unpleasant people. I rushed the second half just to get it over with.
That said, away from the main story there is a fairly interesting stealth-fps game. I had fun doing gigs (small shootout or stealth contracts), NCPD contracts (small shootouts on behalf of the police who had more interesting things to do elsewhere), and even just random encounters (very small groups of gangsters). As you get richer and stronger, those all become simple and dull as well though.
Driving is awful because of both the physics and the traffic AI. Worst of all, there is constant, blaring, diegetic music which can't be turned off or even down. Reason for shooting every screen, radio, and speaker you find, but even that isn't enough.