izigame.me

TLDR: There is some good here, but the game is too clunky and repetitive for me to want to keep at it.
Lots of people seem to enjoy this game, but I simply can't stick with it. I'm about to reach 10 hours with this game and it still can't grab me. The combat is cumbersome and dull, you will win and lose by landslides and almost never by the skin of your teeth. Hack as many guards to help you as possible and funnel your brain dead attackers straight into your line of fire. You will wish dearly for an autofire/overwatch/defensive stance, as your agent's ai cannot find new targets after their current one is dead, nor retaliate when fired upon without your say so. Because of this shortcoming you will tire of attempting flanking manoeuvres with one or two agents, and instead just laser down targets with your entire squad. There is a tactical slowdown you can either unlock with valuable skill points or enable through the difficulty settings, but it doesn't feel like enough to make up for the jank.
Stealth is unsatisfying for me. Compared to Commandos or shadow tactics it just feels too chaotic. No enemy sightlines makes it pretty annoying at first until you learn to deal with their absence. The world design seems to lack diversity for me, I went through two of the major map areas and both honestly felt about the same. Not to mention I felt little to no satisfaction in formulating a heist plan or infiltration route. Most 'levels' seem to lack real options for the player. It's either charge in the front door and likely lose a couple agents (and their valuable if uninteresting stats) or take the smart sneaky way that you do a generic fetch quest or literally just pay cash to unlock. Scouting out these areas is boring too, you slowly walk around the perimeter and try to see what's what through the fog of war before making a game plan. I guess you could send in an infiltrator cloaked to check it out, but they can't hack or hotwire doors, and if you're going to spend the time scouting like that then why not just save and send it for real? That's what I ended up doing...
Speaking of the agents stats and skills, the cloning seems to get in the road rather than providing much of interest. You just scan random citizens and soldiers until you find one with better stats (like regen, health or movement speed), hack them and kidnap them. If an agent dies their stats degrade with each new clone, demanding you either keep them alive or have a supply of fresh clones to transfer their memories to. You can use the same clone base for each agent, but that degrades each clone further again. There's also their skills, it's not so much how you build your agents as it is when you build them from what I can see. There aren't many skills to pick from, and I expect most people will end up with a very similar looking party in this regard at the end of a playthrough.
The other customisation is the augmentations and gear. There seems to be plenty of options, but you have to unlock them by raiding a bunch of bases, This is essentially the whole game based on my experience and what the plot seems to entail. You are to lead your agents through each area of the city, taking down the same subsystems, raiding the big companies in the current area for cash and equipment and then moving on to the next. You do this until you reach the final area and presumably take down the 'big bad' corporation at the end. Could get more interesting but I have no interest in finding out, the story is presented in the form of infrequent phone calls and all to regular emails.
The open world design is full of busy work. Respawn stations require nothing your time to set up, and the game will ask you to do this at every new area. Atms need to be hacked to get passive income, which allows you to conduct research to duplicate the gear you steal. One guard station, bank and CCTV monitoring station exist in each district, and raiding each of those gives you a passive bonus (extra money generated, slower enemy reinforcements, slower camera detection time) and some loot.
Idk, there just seems to be too many dull systems weighing down this game for me. I don't care about the clone system, the dull open world quests or the uninteresting research and development. I'd just rather a more refined tactical stealth game with more interesting levels, or a true sequel to syndicate wars. To me, this just ain't it chief.
The coop might be fun, but I don't care enough to check it out.