The notoriously bad load times are 16 seconds per. Not awful, but not great.
Anyway, I'm really enjoying it so far. The opening in your pokey little apartment is great - there's a basketball to muck about with, and a little window that looks out onto a cooing pigeon sitting on an air vent with yellow light occasionally sweeping over it. Windows really are a strong storytelling tool for the FPS designer, especially in these relatively early days. The opening levels work really well as a tutorial, the game looks lovely, and some stuff that bugged me about the first game seems to be reduced. However, I have just been told I could go see someone at the Silverlight Apartments but not where those apartments are, which tweaked at my Deus Ex frustration nerve...
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Turns out they were easy to find, so that was okay. I had a similar irritation with the 'kill the greasler to fix the fight' mission, where a) all the talk of putting bets on at various times and the greaslers seeming to have different nicknames was really muddled and sunglasses) I used what turned out to be a non-lethal weapon on it which apparently doesn't count and negated the mission. I possibly should have figured the latter out, though, I'll have to re-read the weapon description.
The missions are piling up already, it's cool that I've got lots to do, but with all the to-and-froing I could really use a fast-travel option, especially with the loading times.
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I've got over worrying about missing stuff and am picking and choosing what I feel like doing. The design is absolutely gorgeous, it's like Strange Days the game. Lighting and physics really help the immersion too: knocking into a hanging light and seeing shadows swing back and forth is great, chucking boxes out of the way as you rummage through a dumpster feels really tactile. Lots of nice touches still, like cats and dogs hanging about and looking quite realistic - it's weird but these feel like a step forward, actually believable animals rather than rabid Dobermans leaping at your throat. And an awesome grey who follows you around spouting haikus, like a really pushy Vortigaunt. The voice-acting and philo-musings are still as robotic as the first game though - it's like they think any subjectivity or drama will sully the political commentary.
I'm starting to rack up the mods now. I'm glad they've streamlined it, but it still feels like there's not enough room to experiment with weapons, and the mods clash with each other. It feels more like a branching adventure game with no inventory and some shooting that's best avoided.
I had to resort to setting up a DXIW wallpaper for something less immersion-breaking to look at when it closes the program for a few seconds to load in a level (apparently they did this because they couldn't find a memory leak)
The missions are starting to feel a bit perfunctory now, like I'm just some errand boy not really getting on with the plot. But that might be because I've been playing for hours.
So, a few negatives, but overall I'm really enjoying this.
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I'm nearing the end now. It has started to feel like busywork, lots of random tasks and no real plot progression except for various organisations changing allegiances. It's all about as dramatic as Alex D's vocal patterns. The weapons and biomods are all still pretty underwhelming - I'd really like to be superpowered by this point but the RPG systems are too restrictive to allow it. Still, I can control all the robots now, which is cool. I'm looking forward to meeting JC, assuming that actually happens.
NG Resonance is a really cool idea (a bimbo pop-star based chatbot hologram that turns out to be subtly siphoning information out of everyone who talks to it), although they have some really on-the-nose responses from Alex D to make sure the player understands what's going on. A lot of the writing in this is pretty ham-fisted and didactic, actually, but at least that fits well with the original.
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Bah, I was getting pretty far in this but it's crashing whenever I try to exit the Templar church, which is a necessary location to visit, so I'm having to give up on this. Possibly for the best as I scanned through a playthrough of the rest of the game and it doesn't seem to do much more. Pretty cool that it ends with JC Denton at the Statue Of Liberty though!
I've pretty much said everything about this game already - great design, some satisfying RPG stuff and non-linear design, but plateaus pretty quickly in terms of missions, story and weapons/mods.
Rating: Orange.
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