Genre: Stealth; Sub-Genre: Point and Click Adventure
ESRB: M (Blood from shooting and stabbing, tons of profanity, sexual innuendos with lots of partial nudity)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 20/12
Developer: IO Interactive
 |
| Ah, if only. |
To reiterate, I'm not a big fan of stealth games. Not terribly, anyway. I did play both Oblivion and Skyrim as a stealth guy, along with a few other RPG's. I did enjoy both Deus Ex one and three but I didn't entirely stealth my way around. Fortunately I have a friend who both played the whole game and is a fan of the series (Hey, buddy!) and he does a pretty good job dealing with the stealth. He said to give it two stars, by the way. So I figured I both had a good base and an excuse to play the game using no stealth at all. This does turn the game into a "realistic" third person shooter but with wacky weapons and other silliness thrown in.
 |
| Melee weapons and funny costumes; I approve of anything to spice up a real shooter. |
The game functions just about perfectly as a third person shooter. There are cover features and the shooting controls are solid. One can still use the enemy's Stealth game AI to take advantage of a situation by flanking and hiding to easily confuse them. Which is fine because the level designs don't support this gameplay as much as a straight-forward shooter would. It's not as bad as Max Payne 3, though, and Agent 47 (the player character) can still use the terrain to put up a good fight. I put the game on a harder difficulty because I knew that this style of play would break the game and I ended up with a moderately challenging game in the end. There was a level towards the end of the game where I was forced to use stealth and I didn't appreciate that. Other than that, it worked!
 |
| This is how I stealth. |
How does the whole sexy nun fighting story come together? In a word: poorly. I'm familiar with the controversy caused by the trailer that featured the unnecessary sexism, but that made no sense. The franchise has always had a rather silly side to it, and this is far from the first time a video game has portrayed women in such a light. Regardless, they have no relevance to the story. I wanted to bring that up because that's how I felt about the whole thing. Agent 47 goes rogue against his super powerful government agency. Not the worst premise, no, and only cliche in the sense that it's been done before. But what motivation does this emotionless sod have? I can never understand why he's doing things and how he even gets there. Then there's the villains. It makes sense that the Agency becomes a villain in a "going rogue" story, but who is this cowboy guy? If he's so rich, why is he so concerned over stealing $10 million from people with a lot of guns? And why is he willing to lose likely over $10 million doing so? The dialogue and personalities of the characters are awkward. Add it all up, and I would describe it all as kind of offensive. Sure, that was the goal in throwing around a bunch of F-bombs coming from unscrupulous people. But, more specifically, I wanted to skip some cutscenes to get the unpleasantness done.
 |
| How come a 6-foot-plus buff guy can't steal this costume? That's sexist! |
There's no multiplayer, just a "Contracts" mode. This lets players change the targets around on existing levels and determine what methods must be used to kill them. This sounds cool in concept, but I didn't find the kind of depth I wanted from it. And considering the replay of this game involves simply doing the same levels over and over again and finding all the clickable objects and trying to figure out how to get a higher score, it doesn't create nearly enough newness to interest me. There's also an upgrade system in the game, but it doesn't seem to reflect on the single player... I think. There's no interaction with it during the story, so I have no idea what it's for. The Contracts mode, I would assume.
Conclusion:
If you like stealth games and want an odd combination of silliness and grit, this game is for you. It's nothing that stands out as remarkable, but it is solid in what it needs to be.
 |
| Important note: you can NOT dress up as a clown in this sequel. |
No comments:
Post a Comment