Half-good? Almost.
After retrospective coverage of the game on the Bombcast and a tempting pricepoint at my local store, I ended up buying this. With the basic concept being the much touted "Mass Effect with spies" , despite knowing full well of the middling reception the game had already received elsewhere I figured it was worth a shot.
A co worker who also was interested in picking this up but never did asked me to tell him what I thought of it when I'd finished. In the end I told him it's almost the very definition of half-good. Almost.
First I had to mention that the interactive story elements were actually quite impressive. You have to make decisions with some urgency as there's only a limited amount of time to do so, and there's no way to circle the conversation back around so you can see what would have happened had you said something else. Even in minor conversation your decisions appear to hold some real weight. It's refreshing, and even puts the game above many of its peers in this area. Furthermore, the actions you take have repercussions that seem to send ripples across the entire length of the game, again in a way that almost seems unprecedented. I genuinely felt that I was having my own individual experience, that "never the same game twice" line that you hear so often but never really comes through.
So far so good right? Unfortunately, no. With the strength of the game clearly being decision-making and watching the consequences of your actions unfold, it's disappointing to find this isn't what you're spending the majority of your time doing. Half of the time then? Afraid not.
The meat of the game ends up being the action-orientated missions. Essentially a third-person shooter, although I'd say (without sounding too convenient) the most obvious inspiration would be Splinter Cell. In theory that'd be great, I love that series. However the action isn't even up to the standards set in games like Chaos Theory five years ago, nevermind the more streamlined and combat-friendly Conviction. The basic idea is there, sneak around the level, silently taking out enemies and reading emails, hacking computers, picking locks and so forth. You could play it in more of a gung-ho style if you wanted to, I'll get to why that's a bad idea eventually...
The game simply doesn't handle like you think that sort of thing should. The sneaking around isn't much fun, as it's difficult to know if you're hidden or not. The game isn't using any obvious light and sound mechanics, so usually the best idea is to stay crouched and behind cover if it's available. Cover doesn't always seem to guarantee people can't see you from the other side of it though, but this seems linked to a particular stat that becomes more forgiving later on in the game. So anyway, behind cover (assuming you can stick to it, which doesn't always work either) and running out in a crouched position to take out guys with a melee attack seems to be the way to go. You can move from cover to cover in a fashion similar to Splinter Cell: Conviction but it never seems to work consistently. So you're better off just running out at the earliest opportunity. There's always the chance another guard may come across the body and raise an alarm (you can't hide bodies) so hope the guy you've eliminated conveniently fades out of view before any more guards show up. It seems kinda lazy.
The lockpicking and general hacking are in the form of skill based mini-games, with some dexterity required to get through them successfully. They're not overly difficult to begin with, but messing them up isn't pleasant. Depending on where you character attributes lie, it's quite possible the difficulty of these elements will unexpectedly ramp up and get you into a heap of trouble when you need to depend on being able to pull them off. Get them wrong and an alarm goes off, meaning you're in a firefight.
Again, this ends up being another area where the game just isn't good enough at what it's trying to do. The gunplay is downright bad. There, I said it. Your shots never seem particularly effective at either hitting their targets or doing enough damage, and in a tight situation this'll bite you in the ass a lot. Sure doesn't help when you're artificially forced into situations where you have to take on a large number of guys who know your position (or boss fights) and your character feels dramatically underpowered in these scenarios. It became a little more tolerable in my case when I unlocked an ability to accurately blind fire from cover, but even this didn't seem to work consistently.
Nevertheless I plodded through this stuff because I was eager to get to the story, and the frustration built up because I was undergoing hours of lukewarm action in anticipation of something that would last thirty seconds. And that's what it comes down to in the end: dangling a carrot.
The character customisation (on the cosmetic end) isn't especially great, and to be honest it didn't really bother me. There's different options, sure, but like Commander Shepard before him you kind of just get the sense that the default preset is how Agent Thornton is supposed to look. The weapons and accessories loadout isn't something you have to give a lot of thought into, but it's there at least.
So what did I tell my colleague in the end? This is the closing paragraph of what I posted on his Facebook page earlier today:
"Given that its overall conceptual pitch is very similar to that of Mass Effect 2, which came out for the PS3 today and I can already verify is thoroughly AWESOME, I'd suggest you save up for that instead ."
One day he'll thank me for it.
