When this game was first released, most gamers were likely filled with either awe or doubt. A first person game that barely had any shooting and concentrated on platforming/parkour, in a unique graphical style. I wasn’t the only one to be interested by such a concept. Seeing it in action was unlike pretty much anything else I’ve seen before.

The hype for this was huge. Does it live up to it, or is it gonna be considered overhyped? 

Graphics
The graphical style here is quite original. Some may see a really bland, empty environments, but what I see is great design choices that make this city look like it’s in the future and, well, that reflects the overall impression of the kind of society the game protrays. 

There’s a limited range of colors, really mostly white, blue, green and red, with a slight bit more colors and a few different kinds of environments in different stages. All of it is urban looks and building interior, with not much more, but all of it really works.

The character models look really pretty good. Not incredible, some look a slight bit cartoonish, but it all works with the general look of the game. The animations, especially on Faith (or at least what we see on her >_>) are smooth and just really good. This leads me to one thing that somehow really revolutionizes the FPS genre as a whole: If you look down, you’ll actually see Faith’s body. Crazy, I know.

The one thing that bothers me here is the 2D animations. They could have a really cool anime look, but here they just look…. bland and boring. Looks like higher end flash animations you could see anywhere on the internet. It’s like they really didn’t care about making these animations interesting and they just look… meh. 

Overall, other than the 2D cinematics, the game looks great. A unique and interesting look that I’ll never be bored of seeing. There are a few graphic glitches, some screen tearing at parts, but nothing bad. Overall it runs smoothly.

Sound
The game sounds great. The sound effects are, for the most part, spot on. From the gunshots to trains to Faith breathing heavily when she’s running, everything sounds great. The voice acting could be a bit better at parts, but overall it works great.

The soundtrack is great here. It fits the game’s mood perfectly and just sounds really nice. Though I wouldn’t listen to it if I wasn’t playing the game, it’s really enjoyable to listen to when you’re actually playing. 

Story
If there’s one thing to fault in this game, it’s the story.
Faith is a runner, a person who runs on the building rooftops or building interiors while running from the police(named “Blues” here) to deliver information to various people. This might sound like it could have potential to support a fun story, but quickly the game centers on Faith’s struggle to save her sister, wrongly accused of murder, from the Government. She goes around finding information about people related to the murder and eventually finds who did it, then goes to save her sister. The story is boring, the characters aren’t really likable, the twists are lame and predictable.

The game had potential to have such a great story, but in the end it was just really badly done and uninteresting. 

Gameplay
Running
The main part of the game is the running/Parkour. Most of the time you’ll be just going from rooftop to rooftop, finding routes to reach your target, or get stuck in a fast-paced chase against Blues who will be shooting relentlessly at you until you die, or until you get to the next area, where they’ll magically stop looking for you.

The platforming itself works great. The controls are seamless. L1 controls upward movement: jumping, vaulting over obstacles, wall-running, getting up from an edge, jumping from one edge to another, and other “upward” movements. The L2 button controls downward movements: Sliding, crawling, rolling on the ground, going down from an edge and a few other “downward” movements. The game is made so that, when you press the button, it will do what is needed depending on your position/speed and other conditions. If you’re close to a wall while running you’ll wall-run with L1, if you’re going fast enough you’ll slide with L2 (under obstacles if there are any), and various other actions. The R1 button initiates a 180 turn. You can use it for a quick turn in battle, and if you’re next to the wall you can use it for a Mario 64-style wall-kick and get to a higher wall in the opposite direction.  Everything works smoothly. If somehow something isn’t working properly, it’s going to be because you’re not doing it right. 

Jumping from obstacle to obstacle works surprisingly well, and there are very few parts where the game is too hard. The platforming is all about finding exactly where you need to go. To help you with this, pressing the O button will tell you where you need to go, and objects that you can use will either appear red or turn to red when you’re close enough. That can cause some confusing as the things you need to use don’t always appear red, and sometimes pressing O won’t do anything, but when you get stuck it’s just that you didn’t exhaust every possibility.

Overall, the platforming works great, just as good as the first gameplay trailer that was shown to us. You can do just as good, if not better than what was shown in the trailer. I wasn’t sure it would work that well, and playing it definitely surprised me. 

Fighting
One of the more wonky parts of the gameplay here. First unarmed fighting. The R2 button is the main attack button. You have different attacks depending on if you’re standing, crouching, sliding, jumping or wall-running. Overall most enemies go down in a bit more than 2 full combos. Some require some more, but they’re rare. The hand-to-hand fighting works okay, but is a bit clunky and doesn’t work as well as it could.

Then you have disarming. When fighting an enemy up close, he will try to attack you with his gun with a melee attack. At that time, his gun will become read, which is the time you’ll have to press the Triangle button. This will make Faith go through a small cutscene where she’ll attack the enemy and take his weapon. That’s always a “one hit kill”, and it gives you a gun with almost no ammo. The whole disarming feature is a basically a Quick Time Event, which suck so much in almost any game that use them. But, surprisingly, they implemented it well here, they appear seamlessly through the normal gameplay and don’t interrupt it at all.

The final part of the combat is gunplay. Being in First Person perspective, it’s surprising to see that not only does it NOT concentrate on shooting, but it’s not very good at it either. The aiming isn’t really precise, and the guns have so little ammo it’s pretty much not worth talking about, since one gun will most likely not help you go through more than 2 enemies, if that. But this isn’t really a problem, since it’s 100% to go through the game without shooting once (except one mission with a sniper rifle you need to shoot).

Overall the fighting could be better, but it’s not the aim of the game, so it can be pardoned.

Difficulty
This game truly has an oldschool feel to it. Most of the game is trial and error. Well, mostly error. You will die in this game. A lot. Sometimes it’s not exactly clear where you have to go, sometimes you’ll have trouble going through a room filled with enemies, sometimes Faith won’t do exactly what you want her to, but most of the time, if you die, it will be due to the fact that you didn’t time your jump well enough, or you just fell from a bit too high. Some parts are just genuinely hard. But differently to other oldschool hard games, you have a lot of checkpoints and infinite lives, so dying isn’t that bad, giving you quite a lot of time to know where to go and such. So the game is hard, but incredibly forgiving.

Overall
This is a really good game. The trial-and-error gives it an oldschool feel, the gameplay itself is quite original, the replay value is definitely there if you like doing speed runs and time trials, this will definitely become a really competitive scene, at least on the online leaderboards.
So, if you like doing time trials and such, it’s going to be way worth it, and is pretty much a must buy. If not, I say this is a rental. A MUST rental. 
There are a few flaws, but overall this is very fun to play.  Definitely check this out. Whether you have a PS3, 360 or PC, it’s well worth trying.