Played the demo a bit for the first time. Finished SS1 about 2 months ago on the highest difficulty (except plot) so I have a pretty good basis for comparison. Thoughts:
- Your ability to jump is limited to like 3 inches into the air. It's ridiculous. There also no mantle ability, only ladders everywhere. This is lame. It's slow to use, interrupts gameplay, and makes you feel weak. It's actually hard to jump off ledges now given that there are guardrails everywhere and the ladders have a very large range at which you snap to being on them, and fall damage is also high. I can also see it being irritating when enemies can shoot you while climbing down ladders. Not a fan at all, mobility is a huge part of SS1. Things don't bode well for later levels where mobility is important and you have skates/turbo/jetpack. Here you can't even get over the safety railings everywhere (I guess the station meets OSHA standards now).
- There's a few area changes. Some for the better (circle back to the lift that takes you to your healing bay from the shodan cores), some mostly irrelevant (added security room to your initial med bay room, which you can unlock to find... nothing), some that are purely there to make up for the worse mobility in the remake and which are therefore bad.
- Recycling items for credits is awfully done. The reason it worked in SS2 is because items gave 1 credit and a clip of 6 bullets cost like 90 credits. In other words you weren't radically breaking the economy if you collected 30 items to recycle in an area because woop-de-fucking-do, you now have 2 bullets. Not even the real armor piercing/anti personnel bullets you needed for tough things, just standard bullets. Here, you get 10 pistol rounds for 4 credits, and items recycle for 1-5 credits apiece. So now when you enter a room and see a bunch of junk (and there's a lot more junk than SS2), you're looking at potentially 50-100 rounds if you recycle.
- Recycling is even worse since you have to take it to a recycler, and manually recycling things is painfully slow to do. This is one of the worst ways to balance a game: just making the best strategy of play tedious. You CAN scrap items in your inventory which stacks to 100 and then take the scrap to a recycler to get about half the recycled value you would by hauling the item itself there (but without needing to backtrack every 5s, which is an improvement, but still annoying to manually click multiple times to scrap every item. Not sure if scrap is actually useful beyond this or if its just a bandaid fix to a awful system.
- To top it off, credits at least in the demo don't even really matter because you can only buy 2 mag pulse clips and 4 pistol clips before the store runs out. That's pathetic, I was running around with around 300 pistol ammo by the end of the first level. Either make credits useful and ammo at least a little scarce or just delete them and the stores from the game.
- Inventory management is awful, you're gonna have no space for shit unless there's huge inventory upgrades available later in the game. About 3/4ths of my inventory was taken up by 3 guns, a wrench, patches and grenades/ammo. SS1 was better where all this stuff you were going to carry around anyway took up separate slots from your normal inventory.
- Secrets are harder to find now given that there seems to be no assistance from software. Don't know if there's any good solution to this other than adding a software that does this back in.
- They made the worst puzzle type in the game (where you literally just ran wires back and forth until you guess right), worse. Now it takes time for the power to filter down and tell you whether you were right, and its more confusing to look at with wires bunched up in 3D space rather than the easy 2D panel of SS1, and the wires aren't colored to make it easy to understand. Total shitshow IMO, and they also don't have the automatic puzzle solver usable item here.
- Cyberspace is cool and obviously improved, but I can also see it being a pain in the ass to navigate if there are bigger and more complex levels.
- Damage taken and dealt seems fairly similar as a baseline. Melee is harder since you don't have 20 feet arms like in SS1. Ranged seems stronger since you can headshot now. In particular this makes the Sparq beam and presumably other energy weapons significantly stronger, something that they didn't really need since they are already free ammo and reasonably powerful. Now you can rely on Sparq beam to kill the random roaming enemy and it barely touches your energy supply.
- Enemies also have a reaction time now to shoot you rather than being instant shoot instant hit superhumans so that's a good change. Enemies get momentarily stunned when you shoot them, which makes sense and is probably a good thing but makes it a bit easy if you get the first shot off. Ninjas now throw grenades, though they kill themselves a lot of the time. The security cyborgs have a burst attack which is pretty cool and will almost certainly kill you if you take the full hit on the hardest difficulty.
- I'm not sure, but there seems to be no random respawns? Nothing was respawning as I was running around clearing the final few rooms and backtracking to do stuff. I think they may only be scripted spawns? That'd be lame. Spawning is also lame, you actually see enemies rising out of the floor from elevator rooms. Just spawn stuff out of midair in rooms that we are far from like normal games.
