Around everything else I had to do, I didn't stick many hours into the game at all. Probably about 4-5 hours overall. It's really short and very confusing when you have no idea who "Chang" is. I still don't know if he has been a theme through the last couple of games but not addressing this to the new players is a really bad play on their behalf. With about six missions that are spread over a few days, everything moves fast. Perhaps a little too fast. The plot twists where predictable and lacked anything that would truly inspire or help you to interact with the characters on a deeper level. So throughout, characters were just distant. You are placed as a Sargent called Recker who doesn't actually say anything, even when he is being spoken too, a little anti-social if you ask me. It also appears that even when he is in command, everything is decided by everyone else. The rest of the characters are fairly annoying, you cannot relate to them and you learn nothing about them through the time you are with them.
For a game that competes with Call of Duty, every damn year, they should have a lot of effort and resources into the build and development of the game. However, the image was never clear. Surfaces looked fuzzy, AI's would glitch out, the environment never looked real enough to immerse yourself in. for my first outing, I had really high hopes for it, even with it's imminent next gen release bragging about higher visual specs.
Where the game shines is in combat. Plug in the headphones, crank up the noise and get ready for a shit show. Reserve ammo and steal what you can as enemies come thick and fast with little room for mistake and manoeuvre. Combat is quite fun, it's a bit of a switch from CoD but it's fairly easy to grasp. You cannot just shoot a moving target by sticking the dot on him, you have to consider that the bullet needs to travel to get there, this makes it feel very real and when you have bullets pinging around you, the only thing you want to do is pop the enemy quick before they overwhelm you. The glitchiness (if that's even a word) of the game got in my way a few times, lining up an enemy only to have it push you away several time, the enemies are also fairly spongy and do take accuracy to put down effectively. This isn't the case on multiplayer.
In total, it's a fun and enjoyable game to play, all be it stressful at times but it's weak and short story mixed in with the general glitches and underwhelming visuals, I have to give it a 7/10.
Tune in next week to see my CoD Ghosts review!
