An ambitious mix of Mass Effect and Deus Ex
Note that this game CAN NOT be played with a keyboard and mouse, due to bad coding. Touching the mouse to pane the camera will instantly result in massive clipping, which is the worst thing that can happen in an action oriented spy-game where fast reflects are mandatory. Without a 360 controller, my score would easily plummet down to a 4 or 5, but since I consider the controller a given, it did not affect my score.
Other basic problems include interactive objects such as ladders, which can be triggered just by approaching them. This results in the slow climbing animation, where you are completely helpless to enemy fire. .
The enemy AI is underwhelming and often will run into your crosshairs, or behave in other ridiculous ways. This, coupled with the vastly overpowering stealth skill tree maxed out, can make this game a breeze at higher difficulty levels. These single gameplay annoyances are core to the game, and are frustrating at times.
Where this game succeeds is in its storytelling ability. There are huge cause and effect consequences to your decisions, whether it be killing an enemy or letting him live, or just being able to tailor your communication to different people, who will appreciate different personalities. It's a refreshing change to have all these decision branches which will affect the end game significantly, when most RPGs these days allow only fairly superficial decisions, or the stock 'good' and 'evil' decisions. There are many good parallels to be drawn with Deus Ex, which succeeded greatly in this department as well.
Another parallel is how information is given in this game. Like Deus Ex, you will uncover lots of information and secrets through intel, which is an optional read in your profiling menus. If you are a big story nut, you will love how the plot is expanded upon in this way. There is to an extent some political and social commentary to drive your decisions, but not to the extent of Deus Ex. There is also no sci-fi elements to this story, it is a stereotypical US government secret agency plot.
The main draws and issues aside, a few possible notes of interest are:
-The boss fights are in large part satisfying. On the good side for these action-type rpg shooters.
-Graphics are average and advanced options is very limited
-Checkpoint save system
-Core part of the gameplay is to constantly search for bags of money, used to buy weapon upgrades and intel
-There is a single patch that was released after launch, and I'd advise using it