The Basics: Very pretty disaster porny first person shooter with a cyborg suit
Previous Time Spent: 27 minutes
Expectation of learning Curve: low
Why I bought this: Extremely cheap steam sale (long enough ago that I don't remember it)
First Impressions: This is a good looking game, but my first impressions were marred by expecting it to be fairly boring/boilerplate. I found myself frustrated by the long, live-action CNN/Fox News intro, and the standard tutorial which slowly unlocks controls. I did find the submarine escape in the beginning kind of thrilling, but I ultimately found it to be more annoying due to loss of control than anything else. For a game that seems to be really about a cool cyborg killing small squads of soldiers, it spends a lot of time pretending that the audience is interested in it's story.
My 3 hours: I spent the entire 3 hour playthrough in the singleplayer campaign, figuring that a game this old would probably end up not well-supported on the multiplayer front. The game takes place in 2023 in NYC, with the main character as a marine who takes on the mantle of a crazy cyborg (nanosuit) suit of power armor. This power armor confers a bunch of special abilities to the player, including cloaking, resistance to damage, and seemingly extreme strength. In a lot of ways, it plays like a more violent, sprawling version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Much of the gameplay is focused on advancing from checkpoint to checkpoint while dealing with environmental hazards and squads of soldiers. These challenges escalated in a pretty satisfying way during my 3 hours with the game, and did a fairly good job of introducing the player to new tactics/ideas in order to surpass them. The bread and butter of it is often finding cool places to hide/shoot soldiers from, while taking cover when appropriate, and sometimes turning invisible to feel like the Predator. The main character feels extremely powerful in the suit, bringing me back to old-school shooter games and the feeling of being a one man army.
The story that's told in the game is one of an alien virus and a harsh crackdown, and much of it feels pretty standard issue, but some of the environmental storytelling great. The scene that immediately follows the opening, allows the player to slowly acclimate themselves to a New York city that appears to be under martial law, between audio records on laptops, and the horrible remains of living people. It then allows the player to slowly make their way from Battery Park and head north. The game is at it's best when it's providing interesting combat challenges, or allowing one to feel like a tourist in a believable near future New York.
High
My Highlight: For me, the greatest joy I had with the game came fairly early, and is pictured above, a mix of combat and infiltration set in Castle Clinton, bringing me back to one of the early missions of my beloved Deus Ex. As you can see above, the historical marker is even legible, and the attention to detail shown in the environment conveys a clear sense of place. The game introduces the stealth mechanic there, which is pretty fun, and allowed me to feel like The Predator.
My Verdict:I generally kinda liked this game, but much of the joy I got out of it, I think I got because it reminded me of things I liked better. It made me think of Deus Ex and Half Life 2 the most, between the sprawling levels, the near-superpowers given by nanites, and the environmental storytelling. I can't strongly recommend it, but I think it's a game that is good at what it intends to do .
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