First let me say that i wish we’d still have some of these straight up, linear third person shooters with a good enough story. In the case of this game, a very good story.
This contains SPOILERS!
Back when this game released it looked so generic and the demo didn’t convince me either. But a week ago I saw a video on it and that’s when I decided I’d find a affordable copy of it on 360 and play it via BC on Series X. Sadly it’s not enhanced for One X or Series X and holy shit it shows.
Super low resolution, blurry, jaggies truly everywhere, it’s unfortunate because on PC it still looks quite good actually. But luckily the gameplay is definitely very solid and the story was worth it for damn sure. The gunplay feels good, the physics are nice, the elements with the sandstorm and the destruction at times is fucking awesome and the locations are great, especially the parts where you are on top of these insanely tall buildings.
But again, that story. It really perfectly shows the madness of war, and what it does to the characters. I am so glad I clicked that one video I was watching away before some truly powerful and spoiler heavy parts happened, because there really is at least one very fucked up part in the story and there is nothing you can do about it.
There’s just one thing though, apparently one of the devs has said that everything that happens after the chopper crash at the start is basically a hallucination, like it’s Walker’s purgatory. And I honestly don’t like that. Because all the stuff he’s done in the game never happened? Like mowing down countless of fellow Americans, the white Phosphore part with the 45 or 47 innocents from Dubai? Then my question is, what DID happen before the chopper crashed? Was that basically them arriving in Dubai?
Some movies do this too…oh don’t worry guys, it was just a dream, nah fam.
I think I read once that in gameplay, you only ever go down in elevation… any climbing happens offscreen. So despite being in skyscrapers and stuff, the entire game still feels like one long descent. Pretty cool.
All told I think it’s an okay game. The gameplay and shooting are pretty vanilla and unmemorable. But I really appreciate that the story is so unique and thoughtful. More games should be like that.
The only savings grace with my highschool English class was years later and being able to reuse my papers for my college class. The college class did allow me to reappreciate some of the fine works again.
Inspired the Apocalypse Now movie among other things.
