I dunno.
Sure, the plot, dialogue, and general backstory was a little light. But honestly, how could that be a bad thing here?
Now I'm all for these elements. I certainly didn't love Soul Reaver 2 for it's innovative gameplay elements. But these elements aren't needed everywhere. This is a fast-paced action game, if you shoehorn hours of soliloquising(I tried my hardest to make that a word) it not only breaks the rhythm, but it ends up feeling forced. Why do I need an hour of exposition at every point? The plot did it's job adequately: explain why you're at point A, and why it's necessary to get to point B. Of course you have to take the word of the narrator at this point, you ARE the narrator. The narrator has no particular cause to lie to herself. It's not like you're supposed to believe that she's thinking: "Uh oh, I'd better be thinking that my actions are righteous, just in case people are arbitrarily listening to my thoughts." It sets the stage without forcing players to listen to hours of word-vomit so that their every action has it's cause thoroughly outlined.
This isn't a call for simplicity, it's simply the belief that too much backstory would be EXTREMELY unnecessary. All you really need to know is there. Worst case scenario, it causes a sense of detatchment from the characters. But in this case, that's not overly important, you're supposed to be enjoying the gameplay. The plot is pretty easy to derive: dystopian future, all communication is monitored, so glorified bike messengers Batman their way across rooftops to deliver untraced information to those who can afford to use them. All dissent is silenced in Dystopia, so anyone who is poised to change things is eliminated. You are to help show think ***** in the chain of Orwellian armor so that you can save your sister from being framed for murder and blah blah blah. Not the acme of originality, but then, neither are the cavalcade of well-done sequels coming out this year.
Of course, not everyone does enjoy the gameplay. And yeah, it's pretty hard... at first. This isn't exactly an easy-to-implement idea and it has it's flaws, but it's also an idea that hasn't been implemented often and thus requires some getting used to, like any other action-based game. If you're the kind who can get past gripes of that nature, there's a lot in this game to enjoy, and the gameplay is pretty streamlined once you get into it.
My main gripe is with, oddly enough, the graphics. The focus and everything is nice to see, but there are elements that seem almost prehistoric now. The animation for every guard you kill/knock out feels canned, almost as if it could have been pre-rendered if it looked any better. Their bodies are then static elements that are practically just painted on the environment. The ads all show Faith looking in her reflection, but guess what? There are no reflections. I guess you shouldn't be focusing on how your hair looks while on the run from the Vancouver police(I'm sorry, but this place looks a lot like Vancouver), but it's still an aspect I feel like wouldn't have been too much of a stretch to add. The freeroaming aspect is so limited that they barely render anything once outside the scope of the game, should you manage to trick the system into letting you loose on the rest of the world.
Also, maybe I missed the tutorial on shimmying through small crevices, but as far as I remember, there were none, which made it confusing as hell the first time I had to do it.
