In my opinion it is absolutely terribly written. It's really the worst of the worst when you take people on a 5 minute walk and with no purpose but spewing technological jibberish and underwhelming technological devices, none of which do anything for advancing the story.
It arguably would've been a lot more interesting to walk through the scene yourself, without being put on rails next to a woman who's meant to hide a writer who has absolutely nothing to say by simply spewing out obscure technical terms, that mean nothing to no one.
I've only really been confirmed in my fears that Adam Jansen is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The man is a moron. He seemingly doesn't realize when he's being baited with a terrible secret by his woman friend, and when he's trying to talk a guy out of blowing a womans brains out, he resorts to either bleeding hearts nonsense or kindergarden rationality - This to a man who's about to paint a womans brains all over her office. Of course it's just the bad writing rearing its ugly head again, but it makes the guy seem fundamentally stupid.
The scene (potentially) ends with the two highly pumped guys coming to an understanding within 5 lines of dialogue. "Oh I made a mistake, I better go now - Thanks man!" and running out the door, through which an entire SWAT team then enters 5 seconds later. Apparently they missed the terrorist mastermind running past them. It's THAT bad.
Then there's the tutorials, which much like the cutscenes do nothing except waste your time. You get tossed into yet another video, which explains to you things like what crouching is for, and how moving a box entails picking it up, and moving it. It's THAT bad. There's no reason why you wouldn't simply put that sort of thing on the screen as a subtitle. Just tell me what I need to know! No, here we're given a full lecture of several minutes, 99% of which tells us things we already know, through a voice that seems determined to speak as slowly as she possibly can.
It's just a completely unneccessary waste of peoples time.
I'm through the first mission now, and I gotta say I kinda feel like going back to work, just to break the tedium. It's just not rewarding to keep getting funnelled through corridors, tossing predetermined boxes around (apparently picking up a spray can is too weighty a concept for our idiot, Jensen) so you can lure the next jerk around the corner and hand him a broken bone or two. That's all you're doing at this point, and every single time things are about to get a little bit interesting... AWAY goes the game, and you get to watch a movie of it unfolding instead.
Then there's the voice acting itself, which is pretty terrible. Apparently the writing is so bad, they couldn't even get the voice actors excited about it.
At this point, it's gonna have to pull a rabbit out of the hat. The first hour and a half of the game is a meager 3/10, and nowhere near a 9.
Oh, I also got stuck in a room full of computers to hack. Like 7 or 8 computers. Each needing to be hacked individually. Nothing on them, but I guess I got to enjoy the best part of the game so far - The slightly Uplink-inspired hacking minigame.
