The game starts off well enough – the protagonist, Aiden Pearce, is confronting the man who caused a car accident that ultimately killed his niece. It was a hit on Pearce in revenge for Pearce doing a job at the Merlaut hotel, where he walked in and hacked into the system along with his partner, the shady Maurice. After beating up the man in search of the men who sent him on the job, Aiden still doesn’t get the answer he wants. He is forced to sneak out of the stadium and create a distraction while his new partner, Jordi, smuggles the man out.
Aiden is forced to cause a blackout, turning out the lights in the stadium and creating distractions so he can get past the cops unseen. When he gets out, the police chase him in an exciting car chase, and after Aiden finally escapes, he goes back to his hotel to talk with a mysterious hacker who might be able to get him some more information.
This sequence is really great and does a great job of selling the game to the audience – we see a number of characters, we get a revenge plot going, we have a central mystery to solve (both who ordered the hit on Pearce, and why), we see the comedy relief in the form of Jordi, and we see… okay, Pearce himself sucks, but whatever. How can all of this not come together into something awesome?
Ubisoft found a way.
The trouble, in the end, is that the game is very scattered. The central premise of the game is that you are a reformed “fixer”, a hacker/thug, but a great deal of what you do in the game is not only blatantly criminal, but the main sidequests are taking out hits on other people and stealing information. For a supposed vigilante, you’re pretty much just blatantly a criminal, possibly even worse than the people you’re facing off with given your body count and reckless use of various military grade weapons, including the game-breaking grenade launcher that one-shots almost all enemies and vehicles. And three quarters of the game's rather scattered and disappointing plot is devoted to Pearce being blackmailed - and Pearce himself is a boring character.
Indeed, for an uber-hacker, you really just feel like a thug with a gun and a magic smart phone that various real hackers soup up for you – which would be fine if the game actually called you out for that, but it really doesn’t do much to do so.
The only real highlight is the drop-in multiplayer, which is really brilliant - you have fixers on your tail, and you are after bad guy fixers, so you dropping into other people's game works well, and them dropping into yours wholly unannounced to start hacking you instills a brilliant sense of paranoia.
Sadly, the rest of the game isn't up to that standard, and in the end is just a mediocre cover-based shooter with a gimmick.
Ultimately a mediocre cover-based shooter
The game starts off well enough – the protagonist, Aiden Pearce, is confronting the man who caused a car accident that ultimately killed his niece. It was a hit on Pearce in revenge for Pearce doing a job at the Merlaut hotel, where he walked in and hacked into the system along with his partner, the shady Maurice. After beating up the man in search of the men who sent him on the job, Aiden still doesn’t get the answer he wants. He is forced to sneak out of the stadium and create a distraction while his new partner, Jordi, smuggles the man out.
Aiden is forced to cause a blackout, turning out the lights in the stadium and creating distractions so he can get past the cops unseen. When he gets out, the police chase him in an exciting car chase, and after Aiden finally escapes, he goes back to his hotel to talk with a mysterious hacker who might be able to get him some more information.
This sequence is really great and does a great job of selling the game to the audience – we see a number of characters, we get a revenge plot going, we have a central mystery to solve (both who ordered the hit on Pearce, and why), we see the comedy relief in the form of Jordi, and we see… okay, Pearce himself sucks, but whatever. How can all of this not come together into something awesome?
Ubisoft found a way.
The trouble, in the end, is that the game is very scattered. The central premise of the game is that you are a reformed “fixer”, a hacker/thug, but a great deal of what you do in the game is not only blatantly criminal, but the main sidequests are taking out hits on other people and stealing information. For a supposed vigilante, you’re pretty much just blatantly a criminal, possibly even worse than the people you’re facing off with given your body count and reckless use of various military grade weapons, including the game-breaking grenade launcher that one-shots almost all enemies and vehicles. And three quarters of the game's rather scattered and disappointing plot is devoted to Pearce being blackmailed - and Pearce himself is a boring character.
Indeed, for an uber-hacker, you really just feel like a thug with a gun and a magic smart phone that various real hackers soup up for you – which would be fine if the game actually called you out for that, but it really doesn’t do much to do so.
The only real highlight is the drop-in multiplayer, which is really brilliant - you have fixers on your tail, and you are after bad guy fixers, so you dropping into other people's game works well, and them dropping into yours wholly unannounced to start hacking you instills a brilliant sense of paranoia.
Sadly, the rest of the game isn't up to that standard, and in the end is just a mediocre cover-based shooter with a gimmick.