Hands down, in the bottom three of games I have ever played. I got about halfway through the game and had to stop myself from continuing on not out of frustration, but sheer boredom. The idea of an RPG espionage where you become the quintessential super spy was a brilliant idea. The custom "class" development was a brilliant idea. The gadgets, weapons and overall equipment was a brilliantHands down, in the bottom three of games I have ever played. I got about halfway through the game and had to stop myself from continuing on not out of frustration, but sheer boredom. The idea of an RPG espionage where you become the quintessential super spy was a brilliant idea. The custom "class" development was a brilliant idea. The gadgets, weapons and overall equipment was a brilliant idea.The one thing I will give this game total props for is a more immerse dialogue than I have experienced up to date. The conversations were fluid and will run past you if you don't think on your toes and I feel as though the developers created this dynamic dialogue system where it does actually feel like you are interacting with the NPC's.
The tragic thing is, this game had a LOT of potential for me. There were a lot of good ideas. Sadly, good ideas did not end up translating to well thought out game mechanics. First, lets start with combat. Or rather, lets start with how bad the combat system is. The huge difficulty I found was poor level design and a horrific gunplay system. More often than not, to hit my target and make it relevant I had to aim at a target for 1-5 seconds at a time depending on my class and make sure my cursor stayed on target. If I drifted off for the slightest second I had to re-aim and wait for the crosshair to once again lock-on. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem...except that during this entire ordeal of landing ONE shot I'm being peppered by bots with ridiculous accuracy. To naturally hit a target you have to basically stand up with a glowing red alarm on your head and broadcast to the world that you would like to be shot. Repeatedly. While the game has a blind-fire system...it doesn't really do anything. Enemies aren't really suppressed by it and every once in a while a stray bullet *might* find its target.
Next, the abilities. As someone who enjoys using ability based-characters in a game, this was a total letdown. Cool-downs are horrifically long, but your abilities need to be used rather frequently especially if using a sneaky saboteur character (i.e. NOT a shooter). I can't tell you how many hours I spent sitting in front of my television waiting for an ability to recharge simply so I could sneak past the guard next to a door who NEVER moves as I used up all my gadgets sneaking past the other 5 guards who do the same thing. All this waiting will eventually becomes monotonous and outright boring. Also be prepared to never die as many locations are ruined by a poor checkpoint system which has you respawn in front of shotgun buddy who promptly kills you while the color is still returning to your screen....Over and over and over again.
Furthermore, a lot of "secondary missions" are mandatory and are rarely obvious. I remember one level in particular with disdain where I spent hours trying to clear a courtyard in a forced gunfight only to be killed over and over again as my character couldn't even manage to hit the nteenth story mansion behind all the bad guys. Come to find out, if you purchased "intel" before the mission you could gain access to a sniper level which makes the mission significantly easier and even somewhat fun. The problem is realizing this and getting to it is so non-intuitive its frustrating beyond belief. I'm sure late game it becomes fun as many character-related problems likely evaporate since cool-downs decrease and guns become usable, but for the first 10 hours of gameplay the whole thing feels like an overly tedious grind session.
This game had a lot of potential and I wanted to like it. I really did. But after spending hours upon hours either waiting for abilities to cool-down, running out of ammo/gadgets, or being instantly killed because of a poorly thought out checkpoint system I had to put the game down to retain my sanity. Its a shame, because this game *could* have been great.
(+): Great concepts, highly interactive dialogue system, good plot
(-): Lackluster graphics, poorly executed gameplay mechanics, horrifically executed abilities, occasional game breaking bugs, too many "forced" shootouts make playing non-shooter characters nearly impossible early on… Expand
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