Good, disturbing, annoying, beautiful, intriguing, frustrating. STARFORCE WARNING!
You do get drawn in to the story and it brings you through a lot of twists. As an adventure game, it deserves mixed reviews. A lot of the exploring and dialog works very well; however, at times, it seems like walking around, followed by cutscenes, followed by a difficult puzzle. Solve the puzzle (or look up the solution on the net), then repeat. This part I found weakened the game a bit. You don't feel like you have puzzles or challenges on your mind all the time -- like in some games where you're always thinking "I wonder if this will help me with that thing I haven't figured out yet". In this game, when you come to a puzzle, it's a matter of solving the puzzle; there is no point looking elsewhere or doing any other exploring -- usually, you're at a dead-end until you click all the right things (and some of them are long, tedious solutions.) So instead of helping the story, the puzzles feel like roadblocks (about a dozen of them total) tossed in to the story to make it a legitimate adventure game, but not really integrated with it. This can be contrasted to Syberia-I where most of the puzzles worked to further your experience in the story.
More frustration comes when exploring scenes for useful items. In this game, you can look at the same item several times, and not be able to do anything with it, even though you think it might be useful. Later on, you will need this item, then.. you need to go back to it, and suddenly, you can look at it, or pick it up, etc. This is very frustrating because things have to happen in a certain sequence. Even if you know you need this item, you'll get nothing at first.. you need to go to the place where you need it, be told "you might need to use something..." then go back, now suddenly the item is available to you. Why couldn't I pick it up before that? So be aware that many things have to happen in a very linear way, and you will have to do backtracking to make the sequence happen the way it's written. In some cases, I already had reached the place where it was obvious to me that I needed an item -- but until you actually click on the right things to make it tell you "you need something to solve this," you can't go back and actually pick it up.
A final point that shouldn't be ignored: THIS GAME INSTALLS THE VERY CONTROVERSIAL STARFORCE PROTECTION SYSTEM DRIVERS ON YOUR SYSTEM. If you don't know about this, search the net to find out how damaging this can be to your system. I would never install this software on a system I "cared about." It shouldn't damage your hardware (though some claim otherwise,) but will leave your system in a state where it will not perform well and is more vulnerable to hacker attacks... and, it can't be easily removed. I.e. once you install this, consider that you will have to totally re-install Windows to make your system "clean" again. I put this on a game system that I had recently purchased, and planned to re-load the OS from the restore image after I was done with this game. Is that a lot to ask of a game player ??... YES, that's why starfoce has fallen into disfavor amid lawsuits and boycotts, and companies like Ubisoft [not the publisher of this game] are trying to restore their tarnished image by vowing never to use software like this again (or face more lawsuits, presumably.)
I don't really want to count this last point against the game developers, because things like this are usually out of their hands. It's the publishers/distributors how are responsible for this.