An always-online singleplayer game that suffers from nearly every symptom of early 2010's "cinematic game design". Scripted, linear, animation-centric, sluggish and unresponsive. With unacceptable checkpoint design and ridiculous loading times even on very fast hardware. Half the story is conveyed via TV show episodes that are streamed from external servers instead of installed locally, and half the exposition of the rest is delivered via incessant overly verbose text-only readables. The only person I can recommend this to is a Sam Lake super-fan, and even then I advise only to watch a playthrough. It's not worth being an interactive product. Also, the day those servers go down, you will lose half of what you paid for.

I bet many players uninstalled in Act 4 part 1. A puzzle with multiple consecutive insta-death timing challenges, and a single failure sends you back before two ladder climbs, two walking sections, four cutscenes and an entire miniboss fight. It's obvious that the checkpoints didn't go through a single second of QA.

A very faithful remake that trades in some of the charm of the original's insane design for a less obtuse user interface. The original is quite literally too far ahead of its time, having a UI that would be best suited for direct neural linking. So, sorry, but no analog character stance system in this one. This remake replaces all that with traditional FPS controls. Also, fortunately it doesn't add any training wheels, so you will have to pay attention to know what you're doing. The objectives and progression make sense and nothing is truly "hidden" so you will find what you need to find by exploring. Damage types are also very intuitive and it's easy to optimize the way you deal with combat. The game has a lot of replayability because of the weapon upgrades and limited inventory that force you to adopt specific loadouds. Apparently I never found one of the available weapons. The music is decent, but it's missing the chaotic dynamism of the original's music, which would mix and change with layers depending on your activities. This game basically just has music for exploration and music for combat, and the music director is lazy and often starts and ends the combat music too late.

It suffers from some minor annoyances, such as unskippable cutscenes and death animations. The item pickup system has some issues that are not present in the original. Keybinding is lacking, since you can't bind things to mouse 4 and 5. You also can't name your save files. The performance, though, is extremely good. A nice thing to see is that the game nearly devoid of all bugs. Only once did I encounter a bug that prevented healing items from functioning, and once I respawned on an unsecured deck even though I should have died, and the game crashed as a result.