First Impressions

The word that keeps springing to my mind to describe this game is “personality”. It has it in spades.

I’m liking the variety in gameplay – some gunfights, some stealth, some sniping, some NPC interaction, and heaps of gadgets, most of which actually get a bit of use.

Agreed on the voice acting – it’s very much above par. Except for most of the generic enemy voices. But even there the horrible accents are done with a tongue-in-cheek self awareness.
And I think this game has the best passive enemy quips I’ve ever heard!

Very much enjoying it so far. Surprised I hadn’t really heard of it before!

I’m excited to try this one. I played the demo back when it was released, but gave up on ever playing it due to the rights issues (I’m too lazy to pirate)… but then (a few months ago) I found a used copy at a local electronics recycler for $3.

Now that it’s the inaugural WGC game, I have no excuse (except, again, laziness).

So I’ve played a fair bit more now, I’m probably about 2/3rds of the way through, and overall I still really like it.

But a few little niggles are starting to stand out to me.

While the writing and voice acting is very good, I think it could have done with more editing. Probably 50% of it could be 50% shorter in my opinion. When stealthing, you spend way too long waiting for enemy goons to finish their (admittedly usually very funny) dialogue before you can sneak past them and/or take them out without being spotted.
The between missions cutscenes, especially at headquarters, just seem to drag as well. The characters just spend ages standing in spot, waffling on with exposition that could be delivered much more economically.

It’s also a little bit annoying asking you to pick your equipment at the start of a mission before you know what you’re going to need. You can usually muddle your way through any level with any loadout, but I often find myself wanting for some gadget or other I decided not to take. And the default loadout is usually not very useful.

I’ve come across a few little bugs – weird clipping things or enemy ai glitches and such – but nothing game breaking, and I don’t think I’ve come across any potentially bad softlocks.

But that’s about all I can think of that’s really bothering me. My previous pros still stand. It’s got a good balance of gameplay elements, good pacing, fun levels, decent humour, reasonable story and nice difficulty.

Finally getting around to trying it out, nothing like 10 days before the end of the 3 month window haha.

Amused by the first settings screen..

Who advertises a setting as ‘Average Performance’ !