Interesting contrasts in this game so far.
On a micro level, it's not as good-looking as I expected - mainly the textures - but the scale is very impressive, with tons of AI, vehicles and scripted events, and a massive showy 'tram-ride' (i.e. an on-rails level where you can look around a bit to take in the sights but that's it, a la the opening of Half-Life).
Tone-wise, there's the silly Tom Clancy-ish SAS section to start, with cockney banter and bombastic orchestral score as you run through a sinking ship (the tilting ship is at this point a common FPS trope), but then the aforementioned tram-ride which is brutal - you're a Middle Eastern president, getting dragged through the streets then tied to a post and shot in the face - and the US marine section, again in the Middle East, which feels very real and suffocating.
As for gameplay, it's pretty hard - I had to retry the tutorial about 5 times just to get a recommendation of normal difficulty, there's no quicksave, and I'm constantly getting blown up by grenades or shot without warning - and yet you go through large sections by simply following your squad. I generally feel like someone who joined the army by mistake and is blundering through warzones surviving by sheer fluke.
Two levels in, a very immersive experience, but for all the linearity a rather fitful game.
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After struggling with the third level, I decided to take the tutorial's initial advice and set the difficulty to 'new to FPSes', which rankles a little, but better that than be killed by a grenade with less than a second's warning every two minutes.
And, uh, I finished it already. Surprisingly short, and that's including a load of 'follow the NPC' or siege or truck-turret sections filling it out. Speaking of which, it doubles down on FPS tropes as well as 24-style cheesiness pretty quickly. The banter and scenarios get progressively sillier as well; at one point your Captain tells you a playable story from his past (back when he was a 'leftenant', as the subtitles spell it for the Brit characters - not that I should be surprised, as they also spell 'heh heh' as 'hehe') where he shot the main villain's arm off, like this is Shadow Of Mordor or something.
The shooter mechanics themselves are pretty solid (except for those stupid grenades) and the AI's impressive, but frankly it's nothing I wasn't doing in TimeShift before I got my powers. It's not a bad game, but I'm surprised at how average it turned out to be.
Rating: Orange.
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