After playing through this a couple of times I can say that, while some aspect of this mission are really cool, I’m mostly dissapointed. I like that there are some creative ways of messing with the tournament on Lee’s favor, but even the good things are dragged down by this damn elusive target format, just release a normal DLC for once IO, it’s not hard.
First of all, your first playthrough is a mess, you get bombarded with “Lee has been poisoned” before you even have time to know what you are doing. It forces you to make rushed decisions that can be fatal in a “one time only” gamemode.
The fighting mechanic is cool, but again, you don’t have time to learn it, it’s thrown at you without any warning and you’ll most likely fail the first couple of times you try it, which can risk you failing the mission altogether if you decide to take Lee’s place. This wouldn’t be an issue if you could just save, or if failing didn’t mean not being able to play the mission again (or being locked away from playing for 12 fucking hours).
The targets, just like the past couple of ETs, are very limited, so multiple playthroughs can get repetitive, but in this case is worse because of how long a playthrough can be. If that is not enough, most of the targets are badly designed aswell. What’s the point of cancelling Chau’s transaction if the only way to get to the office is by following him, all the doors are watched by static NPCs, so key hackers are out of question and Chau is the only one with a keycard, which is redundant (i think using the right keycard is illegall aswell but I might be wrong on that). Xiao is the worst of all, because she can’t be isolated without emetics or coin lures. Zen is a little better but also has problems. There is the fugu kill, which I like, but that is a hardcoded lethal poison, so you can’t use it if you don’t want to kill him and he won’t accept any food other than the fugu; there is also the cocaine but that is redundant because it’s in an isolated room anyway; technically you can also get him with a gas tank or the water, but there are static NPCs on the kill range, so they’re not viable for SA without emetics. Wu is fine I guess, I don’t have any issues other than being boring.
There is also some questionable design choices. The safe code is really counterintuitive and goes againts with how safes have worked in the game for the past five years. If they wanted to do something different they could have done something like Alexa Carlisle’s safe or even the Freelancer safes. I also don’t get the point of the paralitic poisons. Xiao can’t get poisoned, Zen needs to be poisoned twice because he will take the antidote the first time (which can be counterproductive because you won’t be able to use that antidote on Lee if the need arises) and I don’t see the point of using it on Chau, you might aswell just use emetic or lethal which are easier to obtain, or just use an antidote on Lee and have him beat Roland. Finally, the secondary objective for the level 2 of the arcade just turns the mission into a boring slog, that kind of thing is only fun the first time.
Next up, the bugs, this is really annoying because this didn’t happen a few years ago, but now it seems they are getting sloppier and sloppier. Here is a video of two big bugs that happened on the same run:
(Note: the first glitch can also happen when trying to kill Xiao with the weights)
Other than that, there is also the localization issues that I’ve already talked about, the bug where Wu wont fight Lee that has already been mentioned and also a bug where the detection meter won’t work and NPCs will spot you inmediatly after seeing you once (I can trigger this consistently on Chaus’s office, Wu’s room and Jackie Carrington’s room).
Overall, It’s a bitter-sweet feeling, It’s a shame that a potentially great mission gets heavely damaged by a an obsolete, badly designed gamemode. IO, boys, please, just take this gamemode to the barn and shoot it already, nobody likes it anymore, we just want play your game, please let us play your game. Also remove the damn 12 hour restriction from the arcade, nobody likes that either.
. Would anyone really name their kid Mario Mario? IO could be wrong with their cannon/non cannon statement.
