It's nice, but it could be better.
Primarily, what bothers me is how you talk about "style of play," but really, there isn't any alternative to "sneak around like a bitch." Why? Because there's almost no guns and ammo, that's why!
Every guard I necksnap is carrying a gun. Not just a gun, but an assault rifle. It's not silenced, but you know what it is? Rapid-fire and powerful. I should be able to take the gun off the first guard I kill, and ammo off the rest, if I prefer a more combat-heavy approach. It's not silent, it's not subtle, guards should come running, but you know what? SHOOTING PEOPLE WORKS.
You know what else is annoying in this game in particular, and all of these games in general? The fact that every single guard has a direct neural interface with the building's alarm system. This is not Shadowrun, they're not cybered-up Street Samurai or Corporate Men with implanted commlinks who take an initiative pass to sound an alarm before they start shooting. No, they're regular guys in armor. Maybe they DO have a panicbutton that activates the alarm, but even so, it should not be INSTANT. They should take a half-second to hit that panicbutton and another half-second to level their gun. That's time that you could use to run.
Speaking of which, you know what else is annoying in these kinds of games? The fact that there's no melee combat! If a guard sees me at the edge of his range in a straight linear corridor, I deserve to get my ass shot off, but if I surprise him when he turns around as I was sneaking up to snap his neck, he shouldn't be able to (as previously mentioned) immediately sound an alarm and in the same instant begin firing at me. If you turned around and there's a dude in a crouch in front of you, you're going to be surprised. It's going to slow down your reaction if you suddenly come face-to-face with a guy about to shank you. Say, another quarter of a second.
Why do I keep mentioning the time it takes? Because that should be time that the operative can use to ATTACK THIS GUY IN MELEE COMBAT. Grab for his gun, struggle with him. An immediate, instant thing, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it should be another minigame where you need to jam rapidly on the spacebar to overcome the guard, rip his gun out of his hands, and club him over the face with it, knocking him on his ass, then put a single bullet through his head before he hits the alarm panicbutton. (And if you fail, of course, he shoves you back and starts firing.)
The guards should also have a choice, by the way - shoot, or sound the alarm. Some of them should randomly decide to start shooting before sounding the alarm, potentially attracting NEARBY allies, but not sending the whole place into a frenzy.
You know what else I hate about games like this? Throwaway alarms. If you trip an alarm, every guy in the area comes running - and if you're in an area devoid of guards and trip a camera, a couple guys zone-in for no adequately explained reason, like they're always lurking just out-of-zone for trouble, but vanish if you go where they are without tripping the alarm. But you know what else they do? They forget about you in like, twenty seconds flat! I haven't gotten far enough to be sure of most of the plot yet, but they're on an island in the South Pacific Ocean (I checked the Long/Lat given, by the way, it's empty ocean, and that's not somewhere you'd want to be in an inflatable rubber boat in any event,) with frigging uranium... They're not going to ignore a guard who sounded an alarm and SHOT AT AN INTRUDER (or an intruder sighted on camera) as a false alarm, or say "he probably ran away." Where would he run away TOO? The entire ISLAND would flip its shit, go into panic mode, and start searching the place high and low in packs of five armed men.
Basically, alarms come too quickly and mean too little when they do go off. An alarm going off should basically be the end of a stealth play-through, and probably the end of a gun play-through, too. Alarms should have to be set off at alarm panels on walls, though, giving the stealth guy time to stop it.
