Replayed this when it dropped on PS Plus with trophies and it was a bit of a disappointment.

It's quite a frustrating title. I'm questioning if I actually ever beat this as a child. I always had the feeling that I heavily preferred 2 and 3 and I'm more convinced of it than ever.

The way checkpoints don't reset alerts and keep your health dangerously low can potentially fuck up your entire mission. Enemies spawning behind you suddenly, guards spotting you seemingly arbitrarily and the hidden objectives that can potentially lead to backtracking through the entire level... There's so much frustrating stuff in here. The final boss is also an insult.

If I didn't play this with the rewind option of the emulator (I did not want to use it at first, but ended up resorting to it at the end) I might've dropped it.

I liked some of the level design though and the manual aiming being exactly at the height of enemies' heads is quite the good idea and incentivives not using the auto aim the whole time. I dunno, there is a good game under all of these issues, but it feels really rough.

Hope I'm not misremembering and 2 and 3 are actually better.