REPLACED

I don't know how this one slipped under my radar but I am glad I noticed it eventually. This was a very nicely laid out linear game with a wonderful story. I wasn't sure what to expect and by the end, I was impressed. As someone who plays nearly every genre of games (not shooters though as I am trash at it), this held a level of difficulty that was annoying at best. It lends itself nicely to the casual player or someone who wants to sit and grind it all out. Some of the combat can be overwhelming, with so many skills going on, though mastery of the skills is not required to survive and win a fight.

Just finished this one. Conditional recommend. The negatives: This is a movie game. There is a lot of pressing D to walk right to advance a cutscene. A lot of crawling through an empty ventilation shaft while someone yaps. It's a bad video game design habit, and it's here. There is, similarly, a lot of yellow paint platforming. A lot of it isn't very clever or challenging. You very frequently just walk across a room and hit jump to climb a ledge. The climb animations are *slow* and it got more and more on my nerves as I played it. It makes the game feel padded. The platforming sections that are challenging are really bogged down by whatever causes the awful load screen time - I'm playing from an SSD but it takes forever for some reason. There is one section where I had to avoid the terrain becoming electrified and insta-killing me, then drop down and solve a puzzle, then avoid the electric terrain again so that I could blow up the generators that were frying me. You have to do this like six times in one room. The order is random and I couldn't figure out what the visual cues were for the floor killing me because I died and went to a black screen so fast. The stealth portions are kind of awful. You get locked into your extremely slow stealth-crawl just because. It's hard to tell where the actual sensor beams are because the perspective in the game is so weird. You're locked into a 2D lane, but it shows you foreground and background, and sometimes you just die because you can't tell if you're actually behind a cover object or not. There isn't much reward for exploration - you get some scannable notes to read in your walkman-smartphone thing. You get a few life and energy boosts. I assume there's a cheev if you get them all. I missed a few. The combat is a little goofy. Sometimes you get nuked by grenades and laser beam shots that were fired/thrown after you got locked into the armor-shearing animation that you can't break out of. On normal difficulty it was forgiving enough that I could heal out of it and deal with it. But on the other hand I really like the characters. I really like the world. I really like the story. I really like the art style and music. The beat-em-up combat is fun even if it gets pretty wonky toward the endgame (and the default mouse and keyboard binds are kind of bad, but easy enough to fix). This game has a lot going for it. Flaws and all I gave about a buck an hour to be very thoroughly entertained and see a pretty great story. If you can put up with the kinds of nags I have about the gameplay pick it up.