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Good game, but not a classic

» Pros

GRaphics & graphical effects
Sound
Firefights
AI
Particle gun
Melee moves

» Cons

Suprisingly conventional and mostly been there done that
LOng winded, seemingly endless levels
Repetitive gameplay
Sparse story elements
Suprising low number of paranormal baddies.
Got tired of the seeing the npc ghosts after the first hour.
GAme went to the same well too many times.

» Review

Solid game.

Most of the reviews are mainly judging this game on it's spectacular cinematic firefights and great graphics and effects and sound. HEre the game scores high marks and hence the reason for mostly across the board great reviews. So if you want find out what's good about this game see those reviews.

However the problem with this game is these firefights start to drag in the middle of the game as you realize you're just aimlessly wandering around a maze of a warehouse or office building, killing the same bad guy after bad guy and it just dawns on you that you've done been there done this before. IT dawns on you that you've pretty much killed these bad guys every way possible and you've seen the stuff fly and heard the great sound effects and seen lots of blood and you start to wonder why you are doing this? What exactly is the reason for this? Why am I here? What game was I playing? If I see another barrel, cubicle, medkit, crate, valve, etc I'll puke. Isn't there supposed to be some paranormal stuff in this game?

The paranormal story hook of you always seeing the girl or the guy npc ghost loses it's effect after the first few times they appear. AFter that their continued constant appearances do not hold your attention. You start to just ignore them and you don't care.

Your initial objective of find this Paxtel guy ends up being as endless and unreachable as the levels. YOu get a bit tired of them telling you he's in the building. Oh sorry he's not there. Oh he's in this building. Nope he's not. Oh he's up ahead. hahahah. Just kidding. Want in on a secret? We aren't going to let you meet him till close to the end of the game! So you can forget about him. And ignore this objective. They went to the well a few too many times here which is pretty much a theme for the entire game.

The attempts at trying to make this something other then shooting mercenaries falls flat. First of all these attempts are very sparse. Second, you don't buy into any of these attempts. You don't feel like you're going into the building to see what happened to so and so (or you don't care) and you don't really feel like you're finding or escorting some girl to the top of the roof. You're not really in charge here. The game designers are.

Random Thought: I won't even ask how a 1000 armed soldiers suddenly tiptoed into these buildings and only one guy is sent in to get them. :P

So as good as the firefights are, the story and reason for killing mercenaries is bad.

Thankfully this game is short which helps it keep its appeal. Just when you're getting really sick of the endless firefights, you get to the last couple of levels where you see some npcs and story elements and something other than endless warehouse or cubicle levels and you feel good about completing the game.

However you do wonder what might have been. Certainly the level of polish here was equal to HL2. But it's that they polished up a very been there done that standard fps game that kind of disappoints you.

This standard stuff. Alot of Doom3 here, substitute endless space station for warehouses and office buildings, flashlight on gun instead of either/or, same haunted voice stuff, voicemail instead of email, laptop instead of pda, but not as scary, and with less reason to kill baddies and less paranormal monster stuff. Some HL2 here as well without the fun parts and variety. Throw in the FArCRy AI and endless mercenaries of both FC and HL2 and this is your game.

Anyway expect a solid game, spectacular in some depts, but a let down in others. Polished yet feels like it's missing parts. Really this review should be read in conjunction with one of the glowing reviews and you would get a good idea of this game. I am perhaps too critical in this one and haven't gone into how great the firefights are, but seeing as how you can read about that in 10 other well known places I won't cover them in detail here.