I've been saying for some time now that I have been waiting with baited breath for this game, which was supposed to be the big game of the new systems releases, nevertheless, it's here at last. Does it live up to all I hoped and dreamed, well, to an extent, yes, but instead of doing a review or a wiki, of which you can find a million on the Internet, I decided to jot down some notes into the form of a diary (as it says at the top). The main problem I'm going to have here is reading my own handwriting that looks like an ant with inky feet and a suicide bomb crawled across a sheet of paper and decided to make a political statement in the middle of it.
So, you start by being introduced to all the hacking in the game (okay, this is something I should have mentioned before, as it's the hook of the game. It's very much one of those post GTA 3 games that is using that same basic idea but adding in something different to make it stand out, think Saints Row or Sleeping dogs. The hook here is hacking, such as people on the street to get their bank details or listen in on their boring phone conversations (you can also get a bio on each character, and should I be stealing money from someone with terminal cancer? well, it's only a videogame, so I don't see why it matters). More importantly though is hacking things on the road, such as traffic lights, bollards and other electronic road things which make car chases/ escapes much more fun. The most fun element is the stealth side of things, where you can utilise hacking in to (handily placed) cameras to distract guards, set off explosives, disable their ability to call reinforcements and generally mess them about, allowing you to take them out without being seen (until I inevitably balls it up)), with Aiden Pearce (that's you) hacking some randomers bank account, which he gets very frustrated with when he doesn't get as much as he wanted (even though he'd already got thousands (some people)), it doesn't help that this opening cut scene takes forever either, or that you don't really know what the story is going to be about until you get to the end of the first chapter (of 5). You escape from some stupid American sporting venue that is a nicely done to tutorial and then you meet Jordi (not LeForge), one of Aiden's buddies. At this point I'd like to point out I'm only mid way through chapter 2 as I have spent the majority of time doing side missions whilst rewatching Orange is the new black season 1 in preparation for Friday (woop), so there may well be plot twists I don't know about yet, and therefore some of my comments may seem uninformed.
Obviously when you first get out in the open world that you're going to do is drive around, and it was here I found out that the music is terrible, all generic American rock/rap that I don't care about. It's also where I found out the driving was way too serious, cars handle much more like an actual racing game than you usually have in a free roamer where it's supposed to be somewhat forgiving (that said, after a few hours I got used to it). The driving areas are brilliantly destructible too, and pretty much with the exception of walls, you can drive through anything, allowing for some nifty short-cutting. One of the areas of the map is called Pawnee too, so shout out to Parks and Rec fans (don't know if that's intentional or not).
Back in to the story then, and it's off to meet the family, your sister and nephew. Aiden hasn't seen them in over a year because the daughter died, and Aiden's been out to to get revenge against his sisters wishes ever since, so it's all emotional and stuff, except that you don't know any of that stuff yet, so why would you care? Anyway, the nephew will only talk to his mother and no one else, despite the fact you came to wish him a happy birthday (what an ingrate, Aiden's only trying to be a funcle, as shown by his 'just got out of bed' beard, coat that drags on the floor, baseball cap and face covering doo rag (or whatever they're called, you know what I mean, thug types on TV always pull them up over their mouths before they go and do something thuggish).
This put me off the main story for a while, and hence started me on a path of side mission after side mission after side mission.
So, that's NVZN and it's pretty lame, but what isn't lame are the gang hideouts or CTOS hubs. CTOS hubs are little puzzles that you solve by moving stuff around so you can get up to what you need to unlock, and some of them are pretty tough. Gang hideouts are great, this is what I was referring to earlier when i talked about taking people out with the security camera and explosives and such, except that you have to identify certain target(s) that you have to 'take down' instead of kill (as it, beat them half to death with your night stick). This means sometimes you end up being spotted and shooting your way through to the buggers and just leaping at them. For these missions, I'd recommend bringing a silenced pistol, a sniper rifle, and the grenade launcher for when things get out of hand. In fact, just add the AK47 and that's pretty much all the weapons you need anyway. You don't really need grenades because you can set the enemies off in their pockets. There's also criminal convoys, which can be great fun, but extremely frustrating, where you have to stop a group of enemies from reaching their target location. Sometimes you can just kill them all, but sometimes you have to do a take down on one or two of them, which can lead to broken controllers (it hasn't yet, but it might). This is because you can't really blow the other cars up, because you'll probably take them with you, you can't leap out of your car to get them because their buddies will gun you down, and you can rarely fight your way trough all of them, because by the time you've fought through all the cronies, the target has normally high tailed it out of there. However, this is the best method I've found, because they don't always run, you just have to play your chances. Tying the other side missions up then are fixer contracts, which seems to be a cover all for everything else they didn't have their own category for, which includes (but is not limited to) checkpoint races, point to point races and stealthy following. This probably explains why there's 2 1/2 more of these than gang hideouts, despite the fact gang hideouts are a million times more fun. Plus, there's collectibles and street games (including a form of chess (score!) and 'online trips', which include that spider tank thing you may have seen, but I haven't tried them yet so I can't comment.
Back to the story then and you get to see the big bad, Mr. Quinn, who at first just looks like some old geezer, but then you get a close up and he looks like a mentalist, with different coloured eyes and one of 'those' faces, you know what I mean, when you look at a guy and wonder f he's about to smash a glass of your head just for the 'LOL's'. After this is when you meet your over the phone buddy (who I forgot to mention before) face to face, and, gender twist, badboy17 turns out to be a woman called Clara, with whom you get in to a weird relationship with pretty quick. Now, I don't mean relationship like a sexy time relationship, more of a buddy cop style one, except unfunny, so Will Ferrell's probably in it then. You go from respecting her massively when she's badboy17, then you meet her and get along as two equals, then about 2 missions later Aiden is treating her like something he's scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Is he sexist? maybe, all I know is she's only trying to Help and Aiden is being a jerk just because his sister got kidnapped (forgot to mention that too).
So, your sister gets kidnapped by a former friend, Damien, another hacker who knows all your old dirty hacking secrets and forces you to work for him using your sister as leverage (just incase you wondered, you save the nephew and give him to some doctor to look after, because that makes sense). Whilst Aiden is doing all this he's also trying to locate his sister sneakily) or about as sneakily as you can when you seize an island for yourself). So yeah, Clara moves in to a giant warehouse on a creepy island where you just leave her whilst you go off on adventures, isn't it good how he treats her so nice? You also get to meet Tobias in the process who, within about 5 minutes goes from attempting to kill you at a poker table, to leading you on a foot chase around the suburbs, to giving you the key to the island, to ringing his phone and telling you to come by his shop any time you want. At least you can knock that story out fast.
Not long after, when you're doing something for Damien, he lets you speak to your sister, who, instead of being worried about being kidnapped, is now more interested in the fact that Aiden and Damien used to be friends. Come on Nicky (that's her name), Darth Vader is Luke Skywalkers father but that didn't stop him cutting off his hand. Women.
Not long after this I finished collecting a certain set if collectibles that sent me into a special mission, that at first seemed like a gang hideout, but then you had to defend yourself from 2 waves of onslaught, Obviously the best tactic is to not get spotted, but you get completely surrounded. It was tough, but I enjoyed the challenge in the end, I was however a bit miffed when later on I was introduced to IED's (sticky bombs) that I could have just placed where the cars parked before they arrived (as they always parked in the same places) and blown everyone up immediately and saved 2 hours of my life (oh well, you live and learn).
So, after that, Damien tells you something or other ans sends you to get something (I can't remember what) from Mr. Iraq, a take no nonsense Gang boss who did the classic villainous 'beating someone to death over a tiny thing' that always happens in everything ever made. So, how are you going to get to him. Basically, you pick on one of his henchmen and blackmail him. When you see his face after he realises what is going on is the most emotional moment of the game yet, he's heart broken. All he wanted was to do was make his grandmother happy (true story, you get to listen in on their phone conversation) and be a good henchman and now you've come in and screwed his whole life up, just because he happened to be the one talking to Mr. Iraq when you first saw him. Poor bedbug ('cause they're always in girls beds, which made me not so sorry for him). Turns out then that Mr. Iraq is going to be at an auction, and for some reason you have to steal a briefcase. So, you follow the millions of people that have it for a bit, before getting to a marina and having to grab it, which was where I got really annoyed. Basically, after doing so many gang hideout side missions I've gotten really good at the stealth element of the game, so I snook in, unseen, grabbed the briefcase and... Aiden starts looking through it, whilst the marina is packed with enemies, and obviously, after he's finished arsing around with it you're surround and have to fight your way out. My word that was annoying.
Anyway, that's as far as I've got so far, more to come next week (you lucky, lucky people).
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