Stealth Gameplay
My favourite way to play has definitely been stealth with the mixture of hacking and tech being incredibly satisfying and fits a unique power fantasy I haven’t experienced elsewhere. Being able control the battlefield by hacking things like door and explosives, or just zapping enemies on command, adds an almost sandbox like environment for the player to interact with. There’s also the satisfying choice of weaponry from silenced pistols and rifles to melee weapons
Saying that, I have two main gripes with the stealth system that would’ve made it much more fun if it was designed differently.
Melee Takedowns/Executions
There are very few options for executions with half of them being locked behind certain weapon and abilities. The basic ones involves sneaking up behind an enemy to grabbing them and following up with either a neck snap or chokeout.
This is fine but the problem is that the room to grab enemies is limited and finnicky. You have to stand directly behind the enemy and have your cursor aiming at directly on the enemy. You can’t start takedowns from the fronts of the sides of enemies and even when you think you’re doing it properly, sometimes the indicator just doesn’t show up.
Combined with the fact that even if you’re behind an enemy and are crawling closely, the enemy will quickly turn around and alert your presence. This is incredibly frustrating when you’ve carefully distracted enemies in specific positions for a clean takedown only for the grab window to fail you.
I see no reason why they couldn’t let takedowns be done from any angle. With the dash, it would be a nice move to be able to dash infront of an enemy before they can react and take them down that way.
Multi enemy takedowns would also be amazing. With weapons like the mantis blades, it seems incredibly limiting to not be able to execute two enemies at once from stealth.
Ultimately, melee stealth killing just lacks options when dealing with multiple enemies. A feature like chaining stealth kills without alerting enemies is sorely needed. Dying Light had a similar mechanic a think (haven’t played). You can stealth kill one enemy and time slows down letting you chain into another takedown on a nearby enemy or even a knife kill on an enemy further away.
Enemy Detection
Before enemies are alerted, I think the visual detection is quite fair giving enough leeway and challenge to stay out of sight. It is a little frustrating when it comes to hacking as the moment you hack an enemy, they seem to know exactly the person who did it. There’s no such thing as non-chalantly hacking enemies as you walk by pretending to be innocent. They will immediately be alerted and start shooting you when they see you.
It might seem like a balance choice at first, but it only serves to take fun away from the player while making normal gameplay not much more challenging. Missions that are meant to be challenging will have enemies by alerted by you enemies as you’re a trespasser anyways. When you just want to have fun and hack away at a low level gang, the enemies for no good reasson always know where you are.
There’s already a system where enemies will start tracing the source of a fact to try to find you. The addition of them being to identify the hacker visually just seems unnecessary and takes away from the stealth options of hacking.
Next, once enemies are alerted, unless there a physical wall between you and the enemy, they always seem to know where you are. If you’re standing behind an enemy and they’re in alert mode, they will immediately turn around to attack you even though you’re not in visible sight. You have to wait until they go from alert to searching before standing behind them works.