Best games of 2010

[Flying Arrow]

Vyk,

I definitely recommend an AP rent. For all its clunkiness action-wise (it's not even all that damn clunky if you're patient and know what you're doing), it all fits together rather well. The levels are short enough to not be exhausting, but long enough to still be interesting and satisfying. It's not quite like Deus Ex where there are multiple entry points, etc - they are pretty straight forward from a design perspective. However, the beauty of the levels comes out of the story and role-playing you've done up to that point. All your actions can and will have an effect on a level or the outcome of certain encounters. Certain conversations you've had and characters you meet at the beginning of your quest (you can tackle the main areas in any order you wish) can affect boss fights near the end. One of your superiors tells you at the beginning in a subtle tutorial that there are no wrong answers when it comes to dealing with characters - only consequences. AP doesn't screw around in this regard.

More than anything, you feel like you are an active participant in everything going on. Some missions require stealth while some require a bit more shooting (especially if you're doing favours along the way for a shadier contact). The shooting works (like you said) the way it should in a game like this and once you've added enough skill points to certain abilities (Pistol, Assault Rifle, Stealth, Gadgets, etc.) it actually becomes a lot of fun to work through an encounter using enhanced aiming, shortened critical hit timing and a cleverly utilized cloak. Hell, some of the best missions aren't even action missions but intel-gathering ones involving chatting up a clerk, talking down a hostile or just being generally perceptive in how you handle a specific character's personality. At one point it seemed like one NPC was manipulating me, telling me after that a certain contact of his that I'd met earlier told him how I generally like to handle things politely and reasonably (I'm interested to see during my second playthrough if this is actually as dynamic as it appears). The Perks help a lot, too, as the strength of certain relationships or ways of handling encounters (or a combination of both!) pop up very often, making you feel like you're really customizing your guy uniquely and really role-playing. For instance, I had an enormous body-armor boost for most of the game because of my relationship with one specific character and the number of times I would stealthily and non-lethally take down my opponents. There are probably hundreds of Perks in the game and you'll probably never find them all (I sure as hell won't).

Anyway, this is a long post but only because I feel like AP really got unfairly short-changed by the gaming media. A cheque must have bounced somewhere because AP is nowhere near the game most journalists make it out to be. It really is unique. While it is clearly rough around the edges, it's just so intricate and too well put together in all the ways that count for an avid RPGer to not have some fun with it.