I don't want to spend forever talking about how much better this is than the second one. Instead, I’ll focus specifically on this game. Overall, this does not quite live up to the original, but then that might be just about impossible. It is overly streamlined; however, it hugely dials back that aspect from Invisible War. This definitely has the smoothest, most enjoyable gameplay of these first three. Haven't played Mankind Divided yet, so can't comment on that one. The first person shooting is greatly improved here. It's addictive whether you play it like that, or you go for stealth. Not quite as great as Splinter Cell Blacklist at balancing them, but much better than the ones before this one. The augmentations no longer all require you to activate them right when you need them. I do wish that I had not in a single playthrough been able to unlock nearly all of them. And if I play this one, which includes the DLC where you can also unlock several, I might be able to. In the first game it was literally impossible to access all of them, because every single time you got one, you had to choose between two different versions. For example the one for your feet would enable you to either run silently or run faster. Those are not the same thing, and which you choose greatly affect how you play, how you approach situations. In this one it's about how much effort you want to put into being able to unlock all of them, and you have some choice over which to unlock when. I appreciate that in 2013, a lot of people in the mainstream would simply not be open to how it was in the original. But I do think that the Goldilocks zone is closer to that than what they did here. Choosing to make this a prequel was quite clever and this notion of so much in the game being this is what the near future might hold is a very effective alternative to the original which was set further into the future. The cyberpunk dystopia feel is very much present and there is strong exploration of bigotry.