First installment of What I Think Sucks About This Game
- When you choose an aug it should lock out something else, like Deus Ex. Want to jump higher? Then you give up safe landing from extreme heights. Want to punch through walls? Then you should have to sacrifice lifting heavy objects. Even Invisible War got this right. Combined with an abundance of praxis points the result is there are no hard choices outside of the early game. Which leads to...
- You can be a master-of-all-trades. At a certain point in the game maybe 2/3 of the way through I could hack anything with ease, reach any location and take any route, sneak up on anyone or sneak past any obstacle, and still have fully upgraded strength, accuracy, and dermal armor to go toe to toe with anyone in combat while lugging around an entire arsenal of weaponry. Makes me far less interested in replaying the game knowing my character will end up essentially the same with access to all the same routes and strategies.
- For a game about player choice, why are augs the one and only way to do anything? What about the items from Deus Ex like ballistic armor, hazmat mask, thermoptic camo, multitools, etc.. to give the player options outside the simple augmentation system. It's a huge missed opportunity that they didn't extend the dichotomy explored in the game's plot to the actual game. Yes, he never asked for this, but it rings hollow as the only way for him to wield any power in the game is to use the augmented abilities he may or may not want. He should be given the choice to use them even if he didn't have the choice to get them. That would have been role-playing.
- Arguing for melee combat is a lost cause, but at least they could make takedowns require a little more finesse. The distance at which you can trigger them is ridiculous, and the so-called silent takedowns have you breaking arms and flipping guys onto concrete floors and no one notices anything. The reasoning we heard before the game came out, that takedowns were the "reward" for sneaking up on someone is complete shit, as sneaking up on someone is absurdly easy by default thanks to the always-on radar and stupid AI.
