Double caveat for this write-up, because this is still in Early Access and because I have the nagging sense that I’ve missed some critical aspect of the game that’ll tie everything together (got a “B” rank on both missions, for example.) Speaks to how hard this is to pin down- with the devs citing immersive sims like Deus Ex and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy as inspirations, and a kit that includes wall running, an extensive melee system, akimbo guns, and a host of inventory items. Not sure if the Early Access section quite capitalizes on all these elements though, a trek through an impressively-realized space station (akin to a miniature Talos-1) that’s a little too claustrophobic to be a great sandbox. The cramped environments make incorporating your movement and getting bold with your more complex melee attacks hard to pull off, especially given how hyper-lethal the combat is.

Catch a stray round of projectiles, and it’s game over, the game heavily encouraging you to quick-save often and to use your slo-mo power to correct your positioning. Despite being tutorialized, it took me a long time to appreciate that it’s not something that’ll carry you through gun fights, and is far more similar to something like MGSV’s brief window of slo-mo upon being detected. This punishing approach had me shooting through a lot of this section- especially during the bosses, which seem to be some of the most interesting encounters in theory, with the potential to weave between and deflect their shots, and to get some real use out of your melee attacks, but I oscillated between instantly dying to them and breaking the fight entirely.

Felt especially bad in the last fight, which I was never able to legitimately beat, just stunlocking it with the shotgun on my first attempt and getting it to trap itself in a section of the arena on another playthrough. Don’t know if it's simply a matter of a skill issue on my part, the kind of steep challenge that players will love and rise to the challenge of, or if it speaks to a game that’ll need to be reinvented at some point down the line, altering some of aspect of the game to help everything gel together.

It wasn’t until trying the ‘22 demo, which has been rolled into the Early Access release, that I felt comfortable dipping into the range of systems, the verticality of its cyberpunk sprawl and wider range of enemy types, including a shield-wielding SWAT unit that’s vulnerable to kicks, bringing everything into focus. Level design in general also seems more open, with crenelated environments offering a wider range of paths to the objectives, and set against a backdrop of two rival factions in massive shootout against each other. So, if you are getting the Early Access release, I’d encourage you to try this section out as well- it even seems to be the next portion of the game chronologically, just yet to be re-worked to reflect the narrative changes.

Weird one, but nice to see a game of this ambition in active production, even if its ideas don’t fully coalesce yet. Would rather catch up to wherever this is headed, than drag it back down into the familiar.