It's wild seeing all of the cope for this over a decade after release. Yeah, Ubisoft has gotten worse, but that doesn't magically make this retroactively good...
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this has no value. There are plenty of things I respect that it attempted in a GTA-esque city sandbox. It's just a shame it didn't really do them well.
The gameplay was bog standard fare outside of the hacking, which I wouldn't mind except for that our protagonist is a squishy mortal relying on his magical phone to carry him through a fight. So why are my options so limited in a fight? I have to click my heels together and pray the environment will work with me or else I either get overwhelmed or outright fail a mission through things that aren't really in my control.
Poor mission design choices are endemic. One of the signature features...random crimes...is borderline busted. Oh, hey, check out this crime...oh! You're too close and now the guy got spooked into not being a criminal and is now walking in the same direction as the guy he was half a second from mugging. I honestly thought Yahtzee was joking about that...
Oh! And there is a mechanical incentive to nudge you into doing those. We'll call it "morality" because if it falls too low from you, you know, driving around in this city sandbox and hitting too many civilians in the numerous car chases, well get wrecked! Now every civvy will call the cops on you as soon as they see your face...but you're still an unknown vigilante somehow?
The story is all over the place, with our main character never taking responsibility for the fact he was involved in a heist against the mafia as maybe being part of the reason his niece died. Literally, not once.
Blume is a super evil corporation, apparently, because of course, but other than just possessing data from people dumb enough to have microphones and cameras all over their apartments I don't ever remember them doing anything bad...
There's knock-off Anonymous and Deadmau5 and...God, what were they doing in the writer's room? It's like they had half a dozen story ideas and just kit-bashed them all together...
The game isn't bad. Definitely not. It's certainly not the worst thing ever. Yet, again, just because Ubisoft has put out scummier slop since 2014 isn't an excuse to go back and give this game praise it didn't earn and doesn't deserve. I'm honestly shocked anyone ever came back and made sequels.
It's got a meandering story, bad mission design and characters that I'd sooner lobotomize myself than every suffer through again. You can safely avoid this one.
