i played this game a lot over the past few days, and there's something about the gameplay loop that's oddly addictive to me. the game can be quite tense and fun to interact with, the visual style is appealing (not every game can pull off the faux-pixelated 3D look, but this one does in my opinion), and the sound design is well executed in the ways a game like this needs to be. that being said, there are some more specific issues i have with the game, but i'll get to that
firstly, the main gameplay involves finding your clone amidst a large crowd of people in a randomly generated buncha rooms. you must find a weapon and kill this clone before they kill you. *at first,* this is mostly all there is; officers will come at you with a baton if they see you doing illegal stuff, and there's some environmental kills available to you, but it otherwise doesn't change yet. the thing is, the game continually adds things to the mix throughout the 8 chapters: different weapons of choice for the clone, unique clone behaviors, tons of mutators (essentially modifiers) which range from having a small to large impact on how you have to approach the game. mutators also stack with each other deeper into each chapter, leading to some pretty interesting combinations you have to adapt to; all these things combined lead to a pretty large variety of gamestates. there's also an optional objective you can do for money which i recommend attempting where possible, as some of them can really make the game just that little bit more engaging
the overall feel of the game really does create a sense of paranoia, i think. having to be watchful of the crowds around you, careful of the presence of officers and the various hazards introduced when you get a bit further into the game, adapting to new tactics the clones start using; hell, the clones don't even behave the same half the time. drawing a weapon on them might cause them to run, or it might make them aggro you immediately. they might stare at you from a distance, or they might try to look away from you until you're close enough to stab. i really appreciated this aspect, because it prevents their behavior from being too easy to game
meta-progression takes the form of upgrades for your character and the various weapons you find, as well as a percentage of retained progress towards completing chapters. it seems a reasonable amount, tho i would argue the retained progress is a bit more lenient than i would prefer; i kinda wish the game had difficulty settings for this sort of thing, among others. but the upgrades feel pretty substantial; there were also some where i wondered why i'd really want them, and then later on in the game, i realized they were perfectly suited to deal with a recently added mechanic. i found that to be neat, it felt like fairly deliberate design
the story is fine, but nothing mind-blowing. it holds the premise of the game together well enough and avoids being too generic. but it's definitely not the reason i kept playing, and i found the start-of-chapter cutscenes to be a bit of a formality towards the end, BUT to be fair, i'm not much of a sci-fi person, which definitely doesn't help. again, it's fine, just not *better* than fine, in my opinion
overall (and this is what i want to emphasize), i do think the game's variety, while not unbelievably high, is high enough for a game of its weight. i think some people are underselling the game's variety, especially if they didn't get very far in it. however, not all of it is as good as it can be. the worst offender is that, throughout the last main chapter of the game (the "everything's gone to ♥♥♥♥" chapter, essentially), the missions would just randomly end really early because, if i had to guess, so much random crap was happening that the clone would die offscreen to god knows what. i have to imagine this wasn't the intention, and maybe it was just ridiculous luck, but this happened for like, almost half the missions in that chapter. before that, though, i wasn't a big fan of when the clones would start having "altered" forms with their own health bar, because they would often do this way before you have any chance to engage with trying to figure out if they were really your clone or not; and of course, it's a complete giveaway; even has a sound and UI cue, so i felt it partially undermined a core part of the gameplay. i'd say the chapter before that is when the game was at its strongest, but it was still enjoyable throughout (other than that last chapter, before the final "boss"; the final boss, by the way, felt like a fun enough change of pace to end it off on)
i also find the extra post-game modes fun (i played them till i got every achievement, and will probably come back to them later just for fun), but am not sure the "play a bunch till you fill the bar" format was the best way to go about it. i don't mind it, but still
i have not tried the multiplayer; i don't really intend to, but it could be fun for all i know, i just wouldn't want to play with strangers and don't know anyone else who has the game
overall, i do recommend the game, and i do think it's worth the price tag. i want them to add difficulty settings, because some things (like the attention span of the officers and how dangerous activated clones actually are) felt trivial as the game currently is, and i'd like to see ways to make them more threatening
