I am immensely thankful for a dystopian futuristic setting that is not based on a version of the United States of America taking over the entire world. What a breath of fresh air, a cyberpunk Polish Republic is so much more interesting than all the Kojima-styled game settings we usually get.

The game is at its best in the small interactions, where there is room for intricate worldbuilding and fantastic voice acting, but the main story made me lose interest a few hours in. Visually, it soon gets ugly, which is intentional, but it gets to the point of being detrimental to the gameplay; often the augmentation systems weirdly cover the entire screen and you can hardly see anything. The glitch effects make narrative sense but make the experience feel way in need of being remastered, which makes playing the System Redux version the obvious choice.

I slept on this franchise for too long. I never expected it to be this funny; mixing slapstick humor with the usual attempt at seriousness from contemporary western action movies really works out. While the design mainly supports the fantasy of elegant infiltration and thoughtful strategy, there is room for those "screw it, we are going loud" moments a la GTA, making failed runs actually enjoyable when you try to salvage the mission and get your targets down anyway.

The progression system has been discussed long enough at this point (yes, call it Metroidbrainia if you really want) but I really admire the amount of polish and the potential for more and more content, to me it justifies that such a thing as World of Assassination exists.

Regarding this volume specifically, all missions turned out to be neat sandboxes but Sapienza and Marrakesh do stand out in terms of level design. Also audio is incredibly satisfying.

MORRRRTADELOOOOO POWEEEEEERRRRRR