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A very mixed bag This game is a bizarre mixture of great and terrible gamemaking that could have been a great game. Graphics: An odd mixture of low poly counts, cartoonish character design, and beautiful Source engine textures and effects. You can see the Source engine in this game, but don't expect it to look quite as good as Half-Life 2. Story: A good, deep storyline, with secrets planted everywhere imaginable in the game world. My only complaint here is that the writing and characters are sometimes cheesy to the point of laughter. Also, not recommended for people who are easily driven crazy by goth trends and scenesters. Gameplay: A great balance of stealth, subterfuge, diplomacy and combat where no particular tactic is overpowered. The only limiting factor in how you play the game is there are lots of incentives for making friends and contacts, so you can't be a purely selfish and threatening character and you sometimes have to cooperate with dorky NPCs. Still, the balance and diversity of the gameplay is probably the high point of the game. The combat, which is done in a tactical style where your aim and damage are effected by your skills, is nothing special, but it works. Physics: I've seen a few neat tricks employed, but some of the Havok physics implementation is just sad. Certain objects are pretty laid back and don't really mind floating off in a random direction when bumped. Others are more affectionate and like sticking to my characters' foot. Again, the Source engine is evident, but don't expect it to work flawlessly like it did in Half-Life 2. I would be inclined to give this a 4, especially in light of the fact that the game lets you run around beating people to death with a severed arm. Unfortunately, there are massive technical problems out of the box. Half the time I played it pre-patched, radical memory leaks crashed my computer when I quit. I haven't played a game that messed with my computer this much in at least 2 years. If you're not a big fan of the Vampire: the Masquerade pen-and-paper roleplaying game, you will still probably have some fun with this, but there are better games out.