Average.
The art direction for the city is fantastic, the actual art realisation is awful. The models and textures are remarkably low resolution, and even though UE3 is an ugly engine to start with, this is below average even for that.
The game thinks it's a lot more intelligent than it really is. As if using the words "harvest" versus "rescue" wasn't signposting enough, the characters you apply them to are little girls! The plot "twist" really wasn't a twist at all as it was pretty obvious. MGS2 says hi!
Furthermore, the game is simply a dumbed-down and renamed version of (the awesome) System Shock 2, with some of the most annoying pieces of the Half-Life game put in for good measure. The Stillman section works neatly as survival horror, I really like the body appearing on the table, the shadows of a murder scene only to reveal no bodies, the "doctor" appearing behind you as you examine a table. Unfortunately I missed the first two of these on my first playthrough because in copying Half-Life's "always first person" theme it falls into the same problem - I was looking in a different direction when these things happened, mostly because the screen goes dark and my instinct is to look around for a lightsource or a threat. A proper cutscene would have drawn these details out perfectly.
Even more disappointingly, this survival horror aspect then disappears after the Stillman part.
The game itself falls into the worst trap of backtracking, which is placing a goal right in front of your face only to snatch it away at the last minute and replace it with a series of annoying "fetch" side-quests before you can continue. Lazy.
I also missed out on an apparently cool later event in the game because I was somehow supposed to predict that I should have left the
lawyer from the OC alive, even though I'm supposed to kill everyone else in this world. If there's a choice I'm supposed to make, flag it up to me in a
codec shortwave radio call at least.
The actual gameplay itself is the biggest issue, however. Being unable to reassign shooting to the much better L1 and R1 buttons flies in the face of every other shooter I play. Meaning I've played the game twice and still struggle with the controls. Coupled with annoying delays when switching from weapons to plasmids and back, it makes combat very annoying.
The vita-chamber concept is horrible, it basically removes all challenge from the game, as you can fight a big daddy until you die, respawn, find some more ammo then continue the fight. Turning vita-chambers off means you have to constantly remember to save as the designers haven't designed the world with this in mind, which either leaves you in a constant state of failing to be immersed in the game as you have saving in the back of your mind, or annoyance as you die and realise you hadn't saved for a while and the game certainly hasn't helped you out with any autosaving.
After all that, it fails with general game issues, like unskippable logos on start up, ridiculous trophies with no thought whatsoever, and the worst of all: I completed the game, and decided to go back and search for every audio diary I'd missed, only I had begun a new game on a different difficulty level in between and my autosave from the last boss fight had been overwritten. Ordinarily I would say this was my fault, but when the game springs on you the fact that you can no longer save in the lift prior to the final boss battle, then autosaves, the least it could do is not overwrite that autosave, don't you think?
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