I did my first run through. I actually played the game a bit "wrong" so I’ll probably do a follow-up post once I do it right.
Anyhow, this is a good immersive game. Definitely lives up to its billing as the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. I loved the design of some of the levels, particular Arcadia, the park level. While their needed to be a bit more diversity in the baddies I did like the AI on some of them. Their special abilities normally made them both challenging and fairly fun to beat. The objective compass and maps were both quite useful and I think navigating the sometimes intricate levels may have gotten tedious without them.
That said, after playing Half Life 2 and HL2: Episode 1, I just don’t enjoy lonely games quite as much. How about letting me directly interact with characters on more than a few occassions. I don’t necessarily need fighting allies, but a few friends that aren’t just on the radio would be nice. System Shock 2 is a classic but that was before Alyx Vance showed how to do it. Also, a way to pacify baddies would be nice. Yes, I do enjoy getting them to bezerk, but that’s not quite the same.
Other details after the cut.
The weapons were alright, I particularly had fun with the camera. It didn’t do damage, but by taking centered shots of each type of bad guy you could gain advantages over them or special abilities. I know there’s been a few earlier games with camera mechanics, but this is the first one I’ve played where it matters for more than a few oddball objectives. I also liked the hacking minigame. Essentially it’s a tiles swapper where you have to direct water across the board through a series of pipes. The water flows while you work and some squares are trapped, making it at times quite hard.
Now for mechanical complaints. You meet the full range of non-boss baddies by about the middle of the game. As a game programmer friend of mine pointed out, they keep the difficulty up by instead just upping the hit points and power immunities of your adversaries. So effectively your advancement at times is a trick. You aren’t getting better you’re just grinding. The same was true of the hacking mini-game. Typically RPGs are at least polite enough to make cooler looking versions of later bad guys even if their AI is basically the same. Finally having the reload and hack button both be B is a mistake. The context-sensitive hack option is easy to miss which wastes your time and resources by putting you through the slow energy reload process.
Now for the vaunted moral choice. Little Sisters. I’m not worrying about spoilers on the basic concept because this has been widely discussed. Rescue little girls or kill them for extra resources. Eh. Many a game has offered more interesting choices. The way I intentionally played the game wrong involved not going after their Big Daddy guardians. Their basically the only non-named characters willing to leave you alone if you didn’t attack them. I respected that. I ended up having to take out a few at the end, but I kept it to half-a-dozen.
I could beat the game while playing it wrong because you can respawn at no cost. I won’t go in to details, but until you’re 90% through the game, there’s no consequence but a location setback for death. This sort of undermines the feeling of threat. Why am I supposed to kill people to get the resources to stay alive when I’m already practically immortal? Also, why is nobody else using these things?
By comparison, the wall health units are much better implemented. They help you but they can also be used by bad guys if you let them get out of your gunsights. That is unless you hack one which causes them to poison baddies instead. I think a similar system might have worked for respawning. When you respawn, all the non-named characters in the level get to as well, unless you’ve hacked the unit.
Finally on the plot. Good stuff. I’ll discuss it in detail with spoilers later. It makes a rather effective critique of a Ayn Randian paradise. Interestingly there’s also at least one point that they are either play real subtle or that I’m misinterpreting. The main problem with the plot is that by the time you arrive, your nemesis has basically gone standard totalitarian evil on you (with free market slogans), so the critique fails a bit there. Also, there’s a late mission that undermines the moral on the Little Sisters.
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