Marginal single player game.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Nice graphics

Cons: Poor level design, repetitive, overly linear.

The Bottom Line: 
Great graphics don't make up for poor level design and annoyances indicating a lack of care for detail.

Author's Review
A lot of people seemed to really like this game. The game sites have given it raves etc. So I bought it. This review is of the single player mode. There is a multi-player mode which is better, because it doesn't depend on the aspects of this game that are terrible. But if you expect a quality single-player experience, look elsewhere.

Here are the problems with the single player game:

(1) In many parts it is tediously repetitive. Clear a village of bad guys, go on to the next village that looks almost exactly the same, clear it of bad guys. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. There is no pacing, no sense of the game or story unfolding as you fight your way from section to section. The whole game is not like this, but there are many sections where you feel like you are just trapped in a repeating loop where what comes at you is just more and more of the exact same thing.

(2) Terrible bad guy AI. Basic AI is for the bad guys to try not to get killed once they know where you are and that you are trying to kill them. This game fails miserably here. For example, assume you have the big 50 caliber on the back of the Humvee just ripping up everything in sight. Bad guy walks down the middle of the road towards you, no effort to use cover, etc. It's absurd.

(3) Annoyingly limited voice tracks from the bad guys. "I need some help here" you will hear that phrase 5,000 times in this game. There also seems to be no real context programmed into what they say. "Hey what was that". That was me just blowing the heads off of two guys 3 feet away from you. "Huh, probably just the wind." You start wanting to kill them quickly just to shut them up.

(4) Mostly, incredibly easy. Once you realize that (a) head shots kill everything quickly (b) you can do them reliably with the machine gun even at a fair range with a little practice, this game stops putting up much of a fight. After you get to a certain point, your health automatically regenerates at a slow pace. Have a firefight, run around looking for stuff to pick up, and you are healthy again by the time you're done. There are tons of medical kits etc. lying around, and you never even use them beyond the first part of the game. If you don't want to, you don't even need to use any stealth, you can just pound away Doom-style against huge groups of enemies without worrying about it. Only rarely will even teams of a dozen guys kill you if you utterly ignore cover and just charge into the middle of them and start blasting away.

There are a few bosses and stuff that take more time, but, overall, this game is more about endurance rather than serious challenge. Even the bosses are basically just as dumb, but they take a lot of damage before they die. This game might be a good intro to FPS for younger players, but if you've already played Quake, Doom, Halo, etc. this one will leave you disappointed.

(5) Special "Powers" mostly lame. You get the ability to run faster, jump higher, track enemies by smell, see in the dark. You essentially need none of these abilities to accomplish anything in the game. This could have been so much more interesting than it turns out to be. It's a good premise, wasted by poor execution.

I hope a level designer with more skill picks up this superb graphics engine and makes a better game with it. It's spectacularly beautiful to look at, but the gameplay leaves you cold.

If you think the single player mode is just practice for the multi-player game, then maybe this is an ok purchase, but don't expect much out of the single player mode.