A man wakes in a morgue, an outbreak consumes Manhattan over eighteen in-game days, and the conspiracy unfolds through stolen memories rather than cutscenes. That framing is the whole identity: consuming people grants their appearances and recollections, Blackwatch cover-ups surface through the Web of Intrigue, and the city’s sky shifts from orange to proper blood red as things deteriorate. The escalating colour is a genuine attention-to-detail touch that shows how far gone everything is without a word of exposition. It is a paranoid thriller wrapped around one of the era’s purest power fantasies.
Traversal is the heart. Gliding, dashing and air-diving across Manhattan stays fun from the opening mission to a bullet-dive off the tallest building for no reason at the end, and the movement is the reason the sandbox works at all; nothing else in the era matched the sheer freedom of dropping from the clouds and diving back into the streets. Hijacking tanks and helicopters mid-flight adds military hardware to the toolkit, and the whip fist earns its place as the best combat power, grabbing enemies from absurd distances with cheerful abandon. Its grab-happy drawback shows in the messiest late fights, but the ranged reach never stops being useful.
The Web of Intrigue gives the conspiracy its structure. One hundred twenty-nine nodes, all short, all non-missable, stitch Blackwatch’s cover-ups into a readable thread: the Hope Idaho experiments, Project Red Light, the Pariah child. Completing the web teaches lore a first playthrough skims past, and the payoff justifies the hunt. Around sixteen to seventeen hours covers full completion, including every side event to gold, all nodes and every upgrade purchased with roughly 3.2 million EP, and the loop stays rewarding across the whole stretch.
Side events pay for the power curve with a caveat. Glide, kill, war and movement events fund the upgrade economy, but the scoring leans on RNG, with targets like 300-point thresholds that feel excessive rather than skill-testing. Military consume events pay poorly for the effort involved, making them skippable without guilt. The upgrade economy itself works; the events that feed it are the weakest content in the package, and skipping most of them costs nothing but time.
The Elizabeth Green fight is the campaign’s low point. Messy, overloaded with adds and unclear about what it wants, it takes far longer than it should and stands alone as the one genuine wall. Ground-spike Devastators turn out to be the answer, discovered late, and the fight’s difficulty says more about unclear communication than challenge. The final Cross fight is friendlier: not bad, just drawn out, and far easier than memory suggests, evidence that the bosses are inconsistent rather than uniformly bad.
Armour mode divides the build. Damage reduction is real, but losing the dodge roll kills the appeal for anyone who dodges away from hunters, and in the Green fight it proves not worth the trade. One-shot jump-kick inputs misfire constantly, triggered by sprint contexts that never asked for them. The map is hard to follow because so much of Manhattan looks identical and auto-zooms when idle, and one game freeze after the McMullen capture is the run’s only stability blemish in an otherwise solid port.
Overall, this is a dated but joyful power fantasy whose traversal, whip fist and Web of Intrigue payoff outweigh one messy boss fight, RNG event scoring and an unreadable map. Goofy, fun, and well worth revisiting for the flight alone.
