May '19 Play Log II

This game definitely falls into the ‘maybe’ category as far as recommendations go. It has a lot of potential but there are a few things that ruined it for me, primarily the final mission which I didn’t enjoy and it ended up causing the most bugs. Up until then though the game is really quite good. If the bugs were fixed and the final mission more balanced/stealthable this could easily get an 8/10 instead of just a 6.

Pros:

• Good voice acting
• Enjoyable characters with their own personalities
• I liked the conversation and relationship between characters aspect, allowing you to give your player a unique personality
• Can choose multiple playstyles (e.g. stealth vs guns blazing)
• You can make choices that can affect how individual missions or in some cases how parts of the game go
• The above two points mean that multiple playthroughs can feel genuinly different, so it definitely has replayability
• You can collect intel on people and factions. This gives you info on how to approach things and also expands the story, which I enjoy.

Cons:

• It’s not possible to do stealth exclusively - there are some parts that have to be firefights, which is a problem if you do a stealth build
• The final mission is much harder than anything before and most of it can’t be stealthed. Since playing stealth means you don’t really need health increases this makes it harder still if you chose that route.
• The final mission has a ‘choose which path to take’ sort of thing, but doesn’t make it clear which is which. I wanted to take option A so I turned right, but it turned out option A was to the left. Arg.
• The reason/background for the final mission wasn’t clear to me, despite having played all possible missions and read all of the intel. It seemed there was some sort of significant discovery that I somehow missed.
• You’re given very little time to make a decision how to respond during discussions. I get the ‘go with your first instinct’ thing they’re going for, but the result was that it was nearly the end of the game before I realized what the ‘dossier’ option was, and realized I should have used it much more. I generally just ended up defaulting to the same response types because you barely have enough time to read 4 options let alone consider them
• Some of the conversation options were unclear/misleading. E.g., one time I chose an option expecting more insight into the conversation topic but ended up making a bad joke instead.
• Buggy. The inventory menu bugged out sometimes; reloading most recent checkpoint causes the game causes it to glitch; loading a previous checkpoint caused the game to freeze half the time.
• I understand the idea of taking more time to aim causing a better shot, but I think the time it takes is a bit extreme, especially for the assault rifle. This does get better as you level up but I don’t think I should have to stand there for over 5 seconds being shot just so that I can take a decent shot myself.