Played through the original difficulty demo. Some of the upgrading reminds me of Starcraft tavern battle, from the Starcraft 2 arcade. Control groups, at least in what I have played, are much less important than in SC2 due to hotkeys to select your builder unit, all production facilities, or your army units which can have all abilities activated without tabbing through your unit types. There are still control groups that can be created with Ctrl + (1-0), shift/alt do not add/remove but it's fairly quick to get used to the differences between this and SC2.

I have played quite a bit of RTS games and roguelike games, it's a pre-launch demo but I enjoyed it and I intend to play at least ascension level 1. It's got a lot going on, I'm very interested in seeing where this game goes, and am curious to see what it looks like at launch.

If you are thinking about playing this game and haven't already had story elements spoiled for you then I am very happy for you; going into this game uninformed is the way to do it. Nothing in the following will spoil anything story related other than the fact that hostiles exist in the game.

I love that lots of doors can be opened by hacking, finding keycards, hacking, or finding an alternate route and it's just as varied when it comes to ways to deal damage. You have a lot of combat options with different weapons and abilites. Hucking enormous objects at enemies is a wonderful and very ammo efficient way to get kills. The fact that a foam dart crossbow is a useful weapon is wild to me, whenever I end up using it to do something it just feels so awesome.

Usually getting through the current zone and into the next is intuitive, occasionally I get a little lost but the map can get me where I need to go eventually.

I like the npcs that are encountered and the environmental storytelling is great, to flesh out the world and characters. The journey the player goes on leads to many interesting situations with the environment and hostile npcs.

Yes to this whole thing! I love this game so much, is it something I will play through over and over again in short succession? no, probably not but I am currently half way through my 2nd playthrough and trying out a playstyle and abilities I hadn't before is a blast.

Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLymbpuce_n7mvdMFx37KYnG3kOJ-Yp2Y4

The gameplay is perfectly functional, stuff works; however, the interfaces can feel clunky (I got used to it but weapon unjamming sucks) and maps can be confusing sometimes. There are a lot of abilities that I never ended up using either due to expense or me just not wanting to swap abilities around.

I started playing right after finishing Deus Ex (2000) in 2020 so I will always compare them to each other in my head; they are quite different but if you haven't played either I would recommend playing Deus Ex first and if you want to go a bit further back in time after that then this game is great and holy crap the ending is something else.

Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLymbpuce_n7m1nI1zYwcIQRkhsdWXIlen

Incredibly cool story, locations, characters, and abilities/upgrades. The combat is very 'old game' feeling until you factor in the abilities and stealth which add a lot. Prepare to read a lot of logs/messages if you want to get access codes and additional story. You have quite a few choices in approaching each mission with different paths, dialogue options, what abilities/weapons you use, and who you kill or don't. This game is a lot of fun if you can get past some of the dated feel mechanisms.

The infolink sound effect is still my phone notification noise of choice, I really need to turn my notification noises on every once in a while just to hear that marvelous chime.

Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLymbpuce_n7mEdqnoTFZcUgm0iEfzFByu