How did this come out in 2009? It looks and feels like a ps3 launch game, complete with a lame sixaxis gimmick, framerate that struggles to hit 20fps most of the time, constant pop-in (seriously, cars and geometry sometimes didn’t load until they were like 30 metres away), and animations that make Morrowind impressive by comparison (for instance: https://youtu.be/O1P3GBG05Vg?t=53), jerking around like malfunctioning animatronics and with facial animations that basically consist of the bottom jaw moving up and down like a sock puppet. It’s hilariously bad and it makes the serious scenes impossible to take seriously. The colour scheme is that monotone, washed out grey and brown that was so popular at the time, and the lighting is so simplistic that the game feels lifeless most of the time. The dialogue is also terribly written, with stilted delivery that sounds like each line was recorded at different times and the actors never actually saw each other face to face. How was this released in the same year as Uncharted 2, adjacent to GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption?
Thankfully, most of the story cutscenes are rendered in a stylish graphic novel inspired style to sidestep this issue, but it’s still incredibly jarring whenever the game cuts back to in-engine cutscenes. The story is convoluted nonsense that has you going around beating up homeless people and engaging in police brutality, while you help the NSA use the Patriot Act to keep people safe (this is the good path). More specifically, there are these escort missions where the game doesn't let you cuff anyone, even though you have a previously established infinite lightning cuff power, so that you have to beat up the prisoners to make them fall in line (https://youtu.be/XNHSUzUB-CU?t=871).
There are somewhat interesting ideas about the government manipulating people and the conflicts being driven by a class divide, but it’s so disconnected from how the game’s binary morality directly rewards you for falling in line with the powers that be that it totally misses the mark. The choices are also mostly really stupid extremes, like “do you want to murder innocent sick people in a hospital or save them and become a literal messiah?”. Every time you make a major karma choice, the game pauses for 5 seconds to tell you the thing you did, and there’s no way to turn off or skip this notification. I know it doesn’t sound a lot, but there’s a lot of these moments and it adds up over time.
The instant you finish a mission, a pop-up appears and the game pauses, often triggering before the mission’s dialogue and cutscenes are even wrapped up. Everytime you clear a district by finishing a side mission, the game cuts to the map screen (the one element of the game with a consistent framerate), slowly zooms in on the area, tells you you’ve cleared it, and then lets you play again. These weirdly intrusive UI elements add nothing to the game. The power upgrade trees are another underdeveloped idea, mostly giving you wider AOEs on your attacks, which is really frustrating on the good run because it makes it harder and harder to not hurt civilians.
The gameplay is the real saving grace here. Aside from all the other problems I mentioned, the shooting and traversal is a lot of fun (even though the collision detection for the parkour is pretty jank at times). I could easily see my score on this going up to a 2.5 or maybe a 3 if it got a proper remaster. There’s a solid amount of variety in both your abilities and the enemy types, as well as the city setting affording tons of verticality and traversal options. Pretty much everything else here is doing the bare minimum to funnel you back into exploration and combat encounters, because that’s the one thing this game does nail quite well. It’s a shame this game is such a technical disaster, because there is a decent core gameplay loop here at the very least, but it’s buried under so many problems that it's hard to appreciate much at all.
Thankfully, most of the story cutscenes are rendered in a stylish graphic novel inspired style to sidestep this issue, but it’s still incredibly jarring whenever the game cuts back to in-engine cutscenes. The story is convoluted nonsense that has you going around beating up homeless people and engaging in police brutality, while you help the NSA use the Patriot Act to keep people safe (this is the good path). More specifically, there are these escort missions where the game doesn't let you cuff anyone, even though you have a previously established infinite lightning cuff power, so that you have to beat up the prisoners to make them fall in line (https://youtu.be/XNHSUzUB-CU?t=871).
There are somewhat interesting ideas about the government manipulating people and the conflicts being driven by a class divide, but it’s so disconnected from how the game’s binary morality directly rewards you for falling in line with the powers that be that it totally misses the mark. The choices are also mostly really stupid extremes, like “do you want to murder innocent sick people in a hospital or save them and become a literal messiah?”. Every time you make a major karma choice, the game pauses for 5 seconds to tell you the thing you did, and there’s no way to turn off or skip this notification. I know it doesn’t sound a lot, but there’s a lot of these moments and it adds up over time.
The instant you finish a mission, a pop-up appears and the game pauses, often triggering before the mission’s dialogue and cutscenes are even wrapped up. Everytime you clear a district by finishing a side mission, the game cuts to the map screen (the one element of the game with a consistent framerate), slowly zooms in on the area, tells you you’ve cleared it, and then lets you play again. These weirdly intrusive UI elements add nothing to the game. The power upgrade trees are another underdeveloped idea, mostly giving you wider AOEs on your attacks, which is really frustrating on the good run because it makes it harder and harder to not hurt civilians.
The gameplay is the real saving grace here. Aside from all the other problems I mentioned, the shooting and traversal is a lot of fun (even though the collision detection for the parkour is pretty jank at times). I could easily see my score on this going up to a 2.5 or maybe a 3 if it got a proper remaster. There’s a solid amount of variety in both your abilities and the enemy types, as well as the city setting affording tons of verticality and traversal options. Pretty much everything else here is doing the bare minimum to funnel you back into exploration and combat encounters, because that’s the one thing this game does nail quite well. It’s a shame this game is such a technical disaster, because there is a decent core gameplay loop here at the very least, but it’s buried under so many problems that it's hard to appreciate much at all.