You play as an Agent, who is basically a supercop that has been hired to patrol the city as the current police are basically void as a presence in this future city. Your mission is to clean up the city…literally. There are no cutscenes, there are no missions, you simply run around cleaning the street of perps. Does it work?

First off is the look, which is that of a game that wants to walk the line between being realistic and cell shaded. The cell shading technique isn’t as prevalent as something like Viewtiful Joe or Okami, but it does have a lean that way where there are black lines around the character and environments to give you that unique feel.

As mentioned, there are no mission structure setups or anything even close to that; you are literally given a free world to run about in. If you see a building you can go up to it and try to scale it. If you see something move, you can shoot at it. All of these choices are yours to make or not. Also your decision is how you play the game. There are several different stats that are always tracked; things like Strength, Guns, Explosives, Athletics, and Speed. Much like the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the more you do an action the better it gets. Traits associated with your physique also show in the way your character looks, as such things like working on your Strength by beating people with your hands will bulk up your avatar.

The game has a sliding scale-esque difficulty system as you can make things easier for you on your quest of cleaning up your city. As you play, gang after gang will attempt to take you out, and they will be packing firearms, explosives, and vehicles. If you decide to go and take out the dealer of, say, firearms, should you be successful in your endeavors then the next time an enemy pops out he won’t have the same firepower as usual. Your character can do things like jumps from The Matrix, where he can spring from rooftop to rooftop if you want to play it that way.

The game basically plays out by taking you, putting you on the street and letting you run wild.

A few more tidbits to roll over in your mind include the game having over 100 licensed musical tracks. There will be some in-game advertising, your vehicles the Agency (your bosses) give you change shape and form based on how high your levels are in a category such as driving for example, character creation is fairly limited (certainly nothing too robust), and you also keep special weapons based on these point skills.

The explosion physics are simply breathtaking to behold as it is just so gorgeous to see in person the bloom of the fire and the amazing physics at work as debris bounces here and there. It happened by accident (honestly it did), but I found myself at an intersection with just a ton of cars waiting all bunched up there. Well, I had a grenade with me, so I tossed that sucker and watched from a distance as it went off and every single vehicle had its own little explosion. As I watched (at what I thought was a safe distance) I soon found myself getting hit in the head with the debris that I had just caused.

It remains to be seen whether or not this “no mission” idea will work, but the formula already in place was pretty nice to play around with. When I got some hands on time with the game it controlled pretty nicely, but it did have some targeting issues as it often would focus on something I didn’t want to be focusing on…simply because I was turned that way instead. So, the lockon was a tricky problem to work around (and could be fixed by release), but you eventually do and it is quite fun to experience.