First impression: good*
I was positively surprised by the narration. The characters, as I expected from the released visuals, looked a bit cheap tho.
The game has a full-fledged dialog system with multiple answers for the same basic thing. The dialogs seem rather good, especially consideirng the game's apparent combat focus. NPCs have full audio (sadly your name is hardcoded, apparently you ARE forced into a particular character -- although you CAN decide how to play it out, dialog wise).
I haven't had the time to check out the combat yet, so I can't say much about it right now.
The obvious flaw is that the POV is too close to the characters. The bad character graphics become more obvious this way. Characters stand outside their respective buildings, but this isn't all too surprising. The environment's graphics are nice and detailed tho, I'm strongly reminded of Crusader here and that's a very good thing.
The overall first impression on me is Crusader with dialog trees. In other words: good, but that may be because I had very very low expectations (in other words: I didn't expect an actual RPG).
If I find the time this afternoon I'll try out the combat in the introductionary mission. Expect me to post something about it. If the combat sucks, I don't see much hope for the game tho (as the game promises a strong combat focus).
PS:
The cow with machine gun udders is part of a company logo / intro sequence. It is NOT related to the game. Just so nobody gets false hopes.
EDIT:
Alright, the combat is nearly identical to Diablo. Cyber implants work like magically enhanced armor, guns apparently never run out of ammo and you have to run around if a stronger enemy charges at you or you might get killed. Enemies have no AI at all, they just charge you and hit you until they are critically injured (in which case they usually try to walk away) or dead.
The up side is you can't die. if you lose a mission, you go back to the city but lose reputation. You can apparently repeat missions after failure.
So far, so good. It's a hack'n'slash game along the lines of Diablo but has the pro of having dialog trees (note that the information the introductionary NPC gives you is present before you talk to him: you will automatically recognize everyone no matter whether you talked to him or not).
The most annoying flaw is that the health bar is so dark I died twice simply because I didn't realize my health was low until it reached 10/70 and flashed. I didn't even realize I was staring at the more visible ammo bar (which counts down and then gets reset -- apparently it works more like stamina) until I noticed the health bar flashed.
The second most annoying thing is that the game engine sucks. The screensaver kicked in during the intro, took me back to the desktop and when I came back all I saw was a Direct3D mess / distortion. I got it back to run now but all the menus are misplaced now although I rebooted. That sucks.
But hey, it's a post-nuclear Diablo. It MIGHT be fun.
