I played for about 3 hours straight yesterday (didn't realize I had been playing that long). So far I've found it to be quite enjoyable. I like the setting, the characters (from what I've seen) and the execution of cutscenes. I quite like the voice work and the interaction between characters, which I didn't think I would based on the trailers. Watching them play out on my TV there appears to be a bit more subtlety to them that didn't not come across from watching the Youtube trailers. On the gameplay side of things it clearly has a hook that I've bitten on to for both the side missions and the main story. So far I've found there to be quite a bit of variety in the way you can approach a mission.
Graphically it looks a lot better than I thought it would based on some of the impressions and media that were out before release. Even during the day when the videos I saw seemed to make the lighting look quite flat, in person it has a
bit more warmth to. Just enough not to make it look completely flat (to my untrained eyes). I would say its a good looking and performing game overall so far (texture quality/variety, character models, environments, lighting and framerate). Consistently solid all the way around, I would say. Nothing has jumped out that made me say "holy crap, that looks bad". Conversely, nothing has jumped out that made me say "hold crap that looks
really good" either.
There are 2 things that bother me the most at the moment. The first is that you do not seem to be rewarded for taking a stealth/hack approach to missions. In some cases with a bit of patience and experimentation its possible to bounce around from stationary cameras to the guards with cameras into a key area remotely to complete your objective by playing with the AI and hackable objects. I find this to be very gratifying when I can pull it off. No reward for stealth, in it of itself, isn't a big issue to me. I believe one of the developers referred to this as not encouraging or punshing any particular play style. What bothers me is that you
are rewarded with XP for engaging in combat. Even stealth combat actions (non lethal quiet take downs) get XP. So by taking the stealth/hack approach not only do you lose out on the items that are dispersed throughout the environment (understandable as you're executing things remotely) you also lose out on the combat XP with no equivalent hacking XP to make up for it.
The other things is a miner quibble but one I've found to be quite annoying. When in a vehicle you have a nice 1st person dashboard view you can switch to. I really like that view and I'm glad they included it. My issue is that camera control when in this view is
extremely limited. The range to the left is almost non-existent and you get maybe a few degrees of range to the right. Essentially your view is limited to that of the windshield and I don't quite understand why they would do that. Whatever the reason it adds an unnecessary layer of frustration to what is otherwise a cool feature. It would be a cool
and very usable feature if I could at least look out the front side windows.
I have the first 90 minutes (the first 2 or 3 campaign missions and some side activities)
uploaded to YouTube, and my entire initial 3+ hour play-through archived on
Twitch if anyone wants to check it out. I can't attest to the quality of the videos as I haven't had time to look them over.
EDIT
YouTube link updated.