Love a game where I feel the impulse to take notes and am rewarded for doing so. Fantastic atmosphere, great music and voice acting, beautiful and (for the most part) effective interface, and a largely solid story structure. Perhaps my favorite element of the game is just how beautifully crafted the three-dimensional tableaus are—in the moment I was too focused on investigating to really appreciate them, but in retrospect there's some extremely painterly shit in this game, and rather than being diminished it's enhanced by your ability to navigate each scene in three dimensions.

The rest of this "review" is really just me thinking out loud about the very few things that felt off in the game, and (spoiler alert) requires references to the story/structure.

My only real (though minor) overall quibble: At least in my playthrough, the first 4-5 chapters (X, IX, VII, II, VI) felt amazing pace-wise, leaving just enough gaps in the narrative to reward careful documentation of what you've seen so far, while keeping enough continuity to fill in gaps, making each chapter more than the sum of its parts. You're guided to many bodies, but you're still rewarded for searching for others when you have a hunch. I'd have to replay the game to be sure, but I feel like at a certain point the chapter branches open up, meaning that the sequence you experience depends on what order you find bodies in. Given that I didn't really understand the structure/mechanics for a while, it could be that this is very early on (after X, say) or later (after VII or II). But for whatever reason (game structure or just chance in terms of what rooms/decks I entered first) the pace kind of went off the rails after completing my fourth chapter; I started VI in the middle of the chapter rather than the end, and before I found the last body of VI I was thrown into chapter I, I believe. Then, before I had the chance to even orient myself in that new chapter much less go back to gleaning all the information I could from VI as I wanted, I was thrown into V, and so on through the remaining chapters. Perhaps that's intentional (at least one of these quick chapter transitions toward the end of the game feels forced, or at least strongly encouraged), but it's the only gameplay sequence that really took me out of the story and the role of an investigator; I could feel the game jerking me forward with that cloud of smoke, and I felt a little annoyed at it until I could stop click-click-clicking through bodies and go back to really investigating. If this was just happenstance, based on what decks/rooms I happened to explore, I wouldn't have minded the game taking a bit more control over the order and pace at which I encountered new chapters in the back half. After all, once you've been introduced to a chapter's parts, there's still plenty of nonlinearity in the game: you're going to be going back and forth among different chapters all the time while tracking down various identities/fates.

I also sort of wish there were a "hardcore" option where no fates are confirmed until you decide to finish the investigation, or in which no fates are confirmed to the player at all, perhaps until you hear back from the survivors; after all, by all accounts the insurance company is just going along with your story, and until the very end of the game nothing you deduce can be corroborated by a witness. As it stands, the confirmation-by-threes encourages you (or encouraged me, at least) to take a wild guess every time I could be certain of two fates; that isn't such a bad thing when the guesses are based on a specific clue (I know it has to be X or Y guy, and based on the accent, say, I have a hunch it's Y), but feels a bit gamey when it's arbitrary (I know it's one of these two Russian guys, or one of these three Chinese guys, so I'll just throw in the possible names one by one and just wait for the little "ding"). But the problem with a hardcore mode, of course, is that one doesn't know if they'll want or enjoy (or trust a game enough to risk) it in a game like this until they've finished, at which point it's moot. And anyway, in the end one of the magic tricks this game pulls is making you feel like you're role playing just by virtue of the structure, interface, and atmosphere, and that feeling kept me from indulging in these kinds of exploits (well, I did do this once...sorry).

More typing than Uplink, but less exciting. Miscellaneous thoughts: Music gets tiresome. Doesn't feel like the choices of what you hack and what you do once you're inside matter in the least. The memory limitation is annoying but not in an interesting way—it's not like it forces you to make any meaningful tradeoffs/choices (contra how Uplink approaches hardware and memory/CPU capacity, for example), it just forces you to do exactly the same things every mission, but slower. Didn't delete logs after the first couple of missions but never saw any consequences—is there not actually a passive trace mechanic?

Nothing like skimming along the water in your fighter jet before going into a controlled stall and shooting up at some joker you're about to kill. I know the game is made for controllers, but using a flight stick felt great, and once I got the hang of the movement/high-G maneuvers it really felt like there wasn't anything I couldn't pull off with the right plane. The story and dialogue and cutscene animations can be a bit silly, but who cares, that's part of the fun. My main gripes are that, for a game where 90% of the fun is coming up with and executing wild flight tricks and dogfight scenarios, the free-flight/custom-encounter system is extremely rudimentary (how hard would it be to tell the game to spawn X enemies in Y map and let me just jump in?) and the replay/recording system is nowhere near adequate to capture all the cool stuff you do (there are some mods you can use to get around this, but so far it's been a pain in the ass). Haven't tried the multiplayer, I'm guessing at this point I'd just get creamed by people who have been playing for years.

Really fun tactics game that nails the theme. As for the actual mechanics and battle-play, it does a very good job of feeling, looking, and sounding like BSG, which is its #1 job. Some of the tools feel a little janky and others feel underdeveloped (I wish there was more to fighter tactics—the game is heavily focused on capitals/frigates—and the benefits and limitations of Z-axis deployment/movement could have been played around with more), but the core concepts are very solid. The campaign and process of developing/deploying your fleets are pretty satisfying in the early going, but once you hit the midgame it gets pretty repetitive and grindy, and the challenge mostly disappears if you've taken even basic precautions. Increasing the difficulty makes things feel more strategically desperate, but there's basically no tactical problem that can't be solved by running away and lobbing fighters and missiles at the enemies chasing you, which isn't super fun after a few turns. I don't know enough about the mod scene to speak to the existence/quality of custom campaigns, but I'd be very interested to try one.

A fun-enough tactics game that I don't think I'll feel a need to go back to. Lots of missed opportunities for creativity and more polished execution in the pre-deployment planning phase, the gunplay/weapon mechanics (when my ammo runs out I can't find a pencil to use in any of these offices?), and especially the end-of-mission replays (which have so much potential given the source material, but I didn't end up with a single one that looked cool, largely due to the choppiness/repetitiveness of the animations). Really tedious dialogue, but then again that's faithful to the John Wick franchise.

For better or worse running around with a lightsaber and a force push is worth a full star to me in any game. Otherwise just a mediocre kindergarten Souls crossed with a mediocre AAA action game, but one where the enemies range from one-note to genuinely janky (especially the non-human enemies)...the encounters are repetitive, the boss fights are dull, the puzzles are boring and too long (exacerbated by extremely awkward movement). Doesn't commit to being open-world and doesn't commit to being a linear action game, leaving you often with the worst of both worlds. The sliding portions are very stupid. The cutscenes are unskippable, with writing and facial animations that are really tough to sit through. You lose all of your abilities in NG+, where in most games like this the only reason to play NG+ is so that you can experience the full game with all of your abilities. This game sucks without your abilities! But it's Star Wars crap, and it's the closest we have to a sci-fi Souls game, which sadly is the kind of slop I crave. Maybe I should just go back to Jedi Outcast.

Enjoyable story, pretty fun combat (against machines at least, not so much people), often quite beautiful to look at. A nice world to just wander around in. Various minor annoyances: the writing isn't fantastic, many of the quests feel pretty filler-ish, and various aspects of the economy, inventory, and crafting system range from needlessly annoying to downright stupid. But the main joy of the game is just riding around wrangling and executing machine-monsters that catch your eye, and it does that quite well. As with so many AAA games nowadays you don't get to enjoy it fully until NG+, but once you have your skills and your equipment set up hunting is a genuine pleasure.