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[Japo]

The story and the ambiance are great, but 99% of the time you're walking, going through doors, and yes also shooting. 99% of the game is FPS in the end. I don't think it can even be called an action RPG, the RPG elements are so few, and common to the story-oriented "smart shooter" genre--that this game pioneered.

It has a lot of issues, in part because it's so ambitious. The 3D engine was groundbreaking, but there are glitches when you move over steps between areas of different height. About free sight it's not only you, any game that provides a truly 3D environment but doesn't allow free sight with the mouse (but you need to look up and down at times, even to aim melee weapons!) can't work. The controls aren't bad, just terrible. Again they're very ambitious, they're designed to let you do anything in the fully tridimensional world, but it takes forever to do anything. The mouse should have been used to look around, not as a cursor to select interface elements while moving and shooting, that's insane (there isn't even a hotkey to reload your gun!).

It has a lot of potential and it has enough good things to hook you up, but in the end it plays like quicksand. I don't mean that it's hard as a shooter: in most you're surprised by enemies all the time; in System Shock you can surprise them every time and snipe at them, because you can look around corners without being seen.