Dusk, I also played a Shaman as my main character, and replayed parts with a Street Samurai focusing on ranged and an Adept melee fighter.
Myself I used an Elf Girl Rigger/Decker/Pistol for first play. And Troll (girl too I think, not sure) Decker/Adept/Close Combat.
My comment on little replay value is based on there being very few instances where a different character really has different options, and the few cases where there are the linear story re-converges quickly. The combat experience is soewhat different, but since you can play with varied runners in your team, I felt I had also already "seen that" by the time I was through with my shaman. Plus my impression was that the game was far easier with the combat characters - I have a comment about that somewhere in the review…
It shouldn't be so complicated to use the editor to check the options implemented in the game, but probably still a significant amount of time, I don't care enough to try. Or perhaps it's not possible to edit the game.
Yes it's a linear story and not many CRPG could offer them parallel stories. The point for me in this game is that by playing two times the game and few reload/restart I noticed there was many opportunities to do things differently to achieve a goal, much more than the common RPG and I include big AAA stuff.
It's possible that many choices opportunities aren't linked to the character class but there's multiple that are linked to skills and it's main character skill when it's choices during exploration mode, but also there's some hacking abilities during some fights where you'll hardly pick any hacker. Also for a replay it's still stuff to do differently and that's cool for the replay. I mean many choices are coming from your choices more than the character base class but that works anyway for a replay.
About choices I quoted quite many, some points:
- I noticed a choice that seems linked to Orc and it could provide a quick additional mission.
- Multiple choices are coming from your ability to charm NPC or not, it's a good idea to try the two opposite for a play and replay.
- Many choices can also appear if you are broken or not with money and could bride or not, again it's good to experiment around that.
- There's also choices coming from strength and so on.
- There's even some parts where there are up to 4/6 different ways to achieve a goal involving series of different actions.
- In few parts you have a brutal path choice.
- And so on.
Overall I found the choices on how achieved goals a lot higher than most RPG and a quite good element of the game making the replay much better than usual.
One point about choices is for many you don't have them until you fulfill the conditions and that include for example that an item isn't here if you haven't filled the condition, or have some dialog options that aren't show by the game if you don't have the conditions. So it makes difficult to have a good idea of all choices, only those more generals and IF you try do things differently and some linked to attributes and dialogs and are shown disabled if you don't match the condition.
The other good points than amount of choices to achieve goals in different ways was:
- Very good fights, I mean modern RPG tend not be that great on the point. For example it's better stuff than Spiderweb RPG to make a comparison with party+turn based.
- Great story telling even if the writing could have more punch on the stomach. I noticed many story details was working better at replay.
- And last but not least of the good points, is the excellent gameplay density, much much higher than usual modern CRPG (I see only Legend of Grimrock to do better on that point). There's few fillers but not much and that includes little tricks to find and all the fights hand made design tuning.
The only weaker point for me are:
- A more emotional story telling would have been better.
- The exploration is a weak part of the game, with some area well designed on that point, but many very underexploited with only too few tricks to find.
- And obviously the lack of true save can be a burden.
- Well ok also the game could have a bit more gentle puzzles but there's a good range of tricks to find.
To get more different fights from a play to a replay, it requires experiment around it, just count on using a different character is clearly not enough in most cases if you repeat again the same party compositions and tactics. I agree it seems the classes aren't very well balanced. But all in all the game offer the opportunity of a dual specialization so you have range of experiment before to build a very bad character. The problem rely more on the difficulty management with some step increase.
I have the feeling the reviewer didn't explored well the game and didn't noticed too many important elements and ended on many wrong feeling and conclusions. It's for me like someone commenting in detail something it doesn't know well. It's fair and honest from a reviewer job point of view but not satisfying at the end. There's the point of different tastes but I suspect the very low 6/10 rate is coming from this. Myself I would give a 8/10 but you need know the lack of true saves and admit it and known the relative short duration but good replay value by applying curiosity or experimenting and also the price isn't high.
