I'm going to preface this review by saying that, ultimately, I think that this game just isn't for me and, while some improvements would likely have made me play more and even potentially finish the game, you should consider that I am not likely the target audience for what this game is going for.
It's okay. The shooting feels nice, and you can tell that the "wildness" of the shooting is intentional, but the sliding feels a little jank, the bullet-time has a very narrow usage, your gun runs out of bullets quickly yet you're encouraged not to aim so you have to expend almost a full clip on each individual baddy, and then your reloading is slow so you're running around hoping you don't get hit before you finish.
There are probably ways to play to mitigate all of these problems and, indeed, this strikes me as the type of game that is very "deliberate." It knows how unwieldy it is, and it wants you to learn to play around that, but for me to accept that, I would need to care about the story, or characters, or something else. This game's story is all just implicit, and what's implied is as thin as a promise and made all the less thrilling by the censoring.
What's strange is that the loading screens sometimes have hot women dancing in skimpy clothes, yet the game otherwise makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to be sexy. I thought that the latter might be a principled thing (Let's not glamorize sexual exploitation.) but the sexy videos between some levels undercuts that.
I do like the graphical style and shooting itself, and I like a lot of the ideas, but it's overall underbaked and, most annoying of all, I don't think that anything past early access is going to make it much better. Why? Because the primary thing that looks interesting to me is soaking in the atmosphere, the graphics, the lighting and the situation, but the game actively insists that you emphatically not explore or appreciate the graphics, but barrel through instead, killing as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Mirror's edge, which this game feels somewhat like, had a similar problem: It wants you to play a certain way—in the case of Mirror's Edge, to run away as much as possible and only attack strategically or if there's no other option—yet doesn't give you, it feels, the tools to play the way it wants you to play. In Mirror's Edge you die quickly, which encourages you to run, but running doesn't stop you from getting shot, no matter how directly you move toward the destination.
Likewise, in this game I died many times on the "They've Found You. Run," level, and it was almost easier to play by hiding around corners and firing carefully than bullrushing, though I did end up winning by spamming bullet-time. And that's another thing!
You get shot once and you're immediately limping, and while you're limping your gun-arm swings more dramatically than normal, which means you're shooting wild, reloading slowly, and you can't enter bullet-time by sliding because you can't run. "Skill issue," right? But in that "Run" level I'm talking about, a guy busts in, you have your gun fully ready, but sometimes he'll just hit you, or someone behind him will hit you from across the catwalk, before you can really do anything. Again, I got around this, more or less, by spamming bullet-time, but it didn't really feel fun. It was like I was using the jank against the game, rather than exploiting a provided technique.
So in the end, graphically the game is excellent and interesting; animation-wise the game does some satisfying stuff; conceptually the game has a nice premise that makes you really want to see the baddies defeated; but mechanically, it's a little clunky, it gives you that "You're not giving me the tools to play the way you're trying to get me to play" feeling, and plot-wise there is virtually nothing except in implicatory titles and bits and bobs here and there that you hardly see if you're playing the game as intended.
