Pros: Good depth of graphics and ragdoll physics. Interaction with items is easy. Good storyline.
Cons: Not for young children. Voiceover is hard to hear- use of subtitles a must.
The bottom line: Buy it and have fun. It will give you hours of great game play.
Within the first few moments, you realize this is an unusual game. You start as the sole survivor of a plane crash in the middle of the ocean. The 1950's feel, the gorgeous underwater city view, the incongruent music, homicidal characters, and the creepy little girl, all add up to give the player an unusual experience. The plot definitely drives the game, and the mystery is a fairly good one. It is not linear, in that you can walk around and explore areas, and are not herded around as in many console games. There are things, however, you will have to do in sequence to complete the game.
This is a first person shooter survival game, and can be tough. Although there are literally dozens of different types of deadly weapons to pick up. In addition, there are "plasmas" which is a kind of magic that you can use in hilarious combinations with your weapons to inflict odd an unusual deaths upon your opponents. They are quite handy, so learn as many as you can early on.
It does not, however, feel like a typical first person shooter, in that there are enough puzzles, riddles, and the driving mystery, to keep you from getting bored just staying alive and slaughtering things. The controls are not terribly complicated and there are no complex combinations to bog you down. Changing weapons is easy. An excellent map and locator arrow keep you on track in the beautifully complicated city. You are also occasionally helped out via a walkie talkie radio by another man also trapped in the city.
There are choices you can make about your character play that will effect the ending. So you can actually play a couple of times and get different endings.
Be warned though: It is creepy, and there is a great deal of violence, blood and foul language- so it may not be for young children. I had as much fun watching others play this movie-like game as I did playing it myself. We turned off the lights and gathered around the TV to watch it- the creepy factor goes way up with lights off.