This is a Deus Ex game down to the air duct grates behind the staircase, and it's a good thing.
The much hyped emphasis on combat is there, but since I played the original PC products like **** Rambo, it's not all that different for me. Where in the Deus Ex 1 and 2 you could really cover a lot of ground by hijacking turrets/robots, sam-fishering past lots of skipped guards in the afore mentioned air ducts, or blasty blasty, in Snowblind that variety has shifted mostly into weapon/biomod/deployable region. You can still hack like a bastard, and it saves you some grief, but the game introduces so many weapons so early in the game that you get the drift. Within the first 20 minutes, I found and got primers on the assault rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, silenced pistol, hacking tool, frag/flashbang/EMP grenades, see-through-buildings/slow time biomods, many with alternate firing modes. And the hardware only gets weirder from there. Grenades can bounce or be detonated on command, which turns out to be a very elegant 'cooking' solution. You can mix and match 'presets' for lack of a better term, which means you basically pick one in each category (weapon/biomod/deployable) and fight the fights. It's really pretty cool and the game lavishes on the new abilities and hardware consistently. By the time I stopped tonight, I had at least 10 weapons, 5 abilities/grenade types.
I've been playing a lot of console games lately and really appreciate solid controller mapping. Snowblind does a clever thing where left on the dpad cycles biomods, right cycles deployables, and up/down do weapons. Sure, they forfeit the “other direction” cycling, but after a while you're very quickly configuring the right kit for the right situation. While on the topic of consol-isms, it's got what I would consider a pretty harsh save system. You've got to really 'find' the save points after the first couple of missions, and there's usually only one max per 15 minute-esque level. Many missions I never found one, though they could've existed, I can't be sure. Fortunately replaying huge swaths of the game encourages experimentation with your character configuration and can be a good excuse to shift up your strat. One cool thing they do with saves is dump lots of health and energy (mana for the biomods) in the save point area so when you do save, you're in pretty good shape. On xbox live it's got what reviews refer to as perfunctory MP, but I'll have to wait for the PC version to see what it's like.
Snowblind has a decent narrative, with solid writing, mediocre voice recording, and some sharp editing in their cinematics. The whole 21st century cyberpunk war in Hong Kong is convincingly carried off in the gameplay and movies. The game has a lot of the same landmarks that the previous titles did, so look forward to plenty of gun fights among giant statue lions in rainy urban canyons. If the high-tech lowlife aspects of Deus Ex appealed to you, it’s here, though acutely more military in tone.
I really like this game. In many ways I find it a more enjoyable Deus Ex game than Invisible War, albeit with approximately half the features of that title. If you like complicated, kinetic science fiction FPS (regardless of platform) give it a few hours.