Metrocide

Think of this like like a fast-paced top-down Hitman game - you get a contract from a contact, carry out the kill, rinse, repeat. You need to be patient if you want to survive long - if there are any witnesses to your dastardly deeds or you leave bodies lying around, the police presence will increase and you may be identified and shot on sight. Tailing or luring your target into a quiet area is the best course of action (or goading a paranoid armed person to shoot at you so that they get killed by vigilantes or police :D ). In practice this does get pretty repetitive, as the main mode of the game purely involves getting enough money to be able to buy safe passage out of the city. As you progress, you unlock extra weapons and tools and also more contract 'missions', which means you unlock contracts for people who are armed, paranoid, have a bodyguard etc. This increases the variety a little bit, but not that much. Since you die in one hit, you'll often find yourself back at square one with the crappy starting pistol and no money. I should also note that at this time the game does seem to crash fairly often and has no way to save, so that can be a real bugger. The cyberpunk theme and ambience is really cool, and I have certainly been having fun with the game. It's just a tad too shallow for my liking.

The core game-play of stalking a target and killing them when the best opportunity comes along is intense and satisfying. The AI makes really makes the city feel like a self sustaining environment. The downside is that the game gets repetitive once you figure out the ideal strategy. This is a game with a pretty high learning curve and punishing difficulty so taking risks and being able to improvise with the mechanics is almost never rewarded and usually ends in death. Glitches and crashes are still part of the game but some patches have improved stability. What fun there is to be had with Metrocide, it's hard to overlook elements that seem less thought out that end up hurting the game. The pricing of objects seems high in contrast to the low, low fee you get for successfully completing a hit. And the way more difficult hits are priced aren't worth the risk for botching them. A complex hit can be several magnatudes more difficult that just a basic kill but only worth 2x as much--for how punishing the game can be, the more difficult hits just aren't worth the risk of getting seen by cops or bodyguards or even your intended target. The manual gives insight to the development and, while the passion is evident, so is the fact that no one really had a clear vision of what the game was supposed to be. This shows up with the mentioned buggieness and design decisions that could work more in concert with each other rather than in opposition. While the game is a mixture of elements, some that don't quite work, it does deliver on excitement and tension and I do like the game a lot--it's just hard to sing its praises without qualifying them, too. [played on Windows 8.1--paid $5.20 during GOG sale]

You run around and kill people. The starter blaster is frustrating, pulling it out warns people in a radius instantly just by sound and it takes 3 seconds to charge. This means if a person is walking they can walk out of range or around a corner before you can fire. Dumb. You have to pay for weapons that fire like normal, pull the trigger it shoots. But the bigger ones cannot be taken through a security checkpoint, leaving you with the bad blaster. It is a little fun, I like the atmosphere, can get repetitive. It's really a roguelike on fixed maps. You kill people for money until you can afford to leave that area, then it's done. Small variations in gameplay are nice but not enough, you still just end up following a person through streets filled with random NPC's until you finally get lucky and have an opportunity to kill without reprisal. Sometimes it just takes too long for this to happen, other times you just run into the person in a back alley alone. This is a game you pick up for like half an hour or so at a time, maybe an hour. Occasionally NPC's blend in certain spots and you cannot see them properly, the pixel-art nature sometimes leads to NPC's looking like trash on the street. Recommend buying it on sale like I did. Not good, not bad, small pick up and play game. Change the movement setting, default is terrible and the alternative mode moves like Crimsonland.

The game is "ok", but it crashes very often for no apparent reason, and as it does not let you save the game, it means that after each crash you have to start all over again. I am playing it in a Lenovo gaming laptop with windows 8.1 and a GeForce GTX 860M.