I have played and beat the game coming in at about 20 hours for my playthrough. This is an interesting game, and I'm a bit conflicted on it:
- Outside of the casting for M (a nearly white, Indian lady) & Moneypenny (a young black, dorky chick - but luckily not preachy) the game rarely comes off as made for "mOdErn AuDieNcES".
- Bond is handled relatively well here; he's brash, confident, smooth etc. It's an origin of Bond, so not a perfectly recognizable Bond, but I didn't hate it. The game very much follows the Bond lineage when it comes to his handling of women etc. The dialog is pretty good and some of his interactions and quips are great.
- For the most part I thought this was a solid-to-good Bond story. The early parts of the story are very interesting, and there is some legitimate mystery there starting with the first chapter.
- Some of the levels/chapters were pretty cool. You start on a crash retrieval mission in Iceland which is really cool and almost gives it a Splinter Cell sort of feel. Early on as Bond is brought into MI6 there is a training montage that is fantastic. Overall there are some pretty neat settings: a giant shipyard city, R&D facilities in the Antarctic etc.
- Stealth gameplay is what you'd expect from Hitman. The melee scrums and ability to use the environment, such as throwing things to give you some crowd control was really great. The gunplay is shockingly good, I was a little surprised at how good it felt.
- The gadgets are pretty neat. The ability to bluff your way out of situations and the conversations and scenarios that come from the bluffs at times are fantastic.
- I played the game on whatever its normal setting was. I was going to play on the hardest difficulty but after the strongly worded suggestions from the game menus I opted for the recommended setting, and in hindsight I wish I didn't. The way the game is segmented, it just felt too easy.
- The pacing isn't great. It really lags at times, especially early.
The whole is not as great as the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the game lacks synergy at times. It bounces from a legitimate stealth game, to a true Hitman game with open level design, to extremely linear, impossible to lose cinematic moments, and then to "license to kill" moments where Bond is an absolute badass with the gun - very surprisingly, the gunplay moments are probably the best part of the game considering previous Hitman titles and their strengths, but they're not difficult and intricate enough. It's a mix of Hitman and Uncharted.
Overall, for the most part, this is a solid game - and at times a good game. It feels like an extremely high budget Xbox 360 era sort of game, for better or for worse. It gives me even more appreciation for how great the Uncharted games were.
Tl;dr
More often than not it's an enjoyable game with really high production values, that suffers from an identity crisis and not challenging enough. Wait for a sale or when more content releases.
Note: I haven't touched the TacSim missions yet, which I'm assuming will be where a lot of the replay value would come from, similar to Hitman's live content offerings.
