The game expresses a lot of good ideas I think, but poor execution means the moment to moment gameplay is anything but fun.
First, the game is an open world FPS, and everyone likes open world games. The problem is that, with a giant open world a large portion of your time is going to be spent going from point A to B, and here is where you run into the first problem: Checkpoints. While I know that the chekpoints represent a reasonable fixture in the distopian world of "Somewhere in Africa", the problem is that from a gameplay perspective these represent an unneccessary slowdown in gameplay. Your average checkpoint has only a handful of soldiers guarding it, meaning killing them is a trivial affair, even at the outset of the game when you're somewhat poorly armed. Unfortunately, the checkpoints are arranged such that there is no way to sneak through most of them, and even in a vehicle with a significant head start the guards always catch you and disable your vehicle, forcing a short firefight, followed by a short period of tightening the "nut that makes your car work" (located on the radiator of every vehicle made by man).
Second, you have the health system. I know feelings vary on the subject of regenerating health, and it seems that Ubisoft tried to split the difference by giving you a partially regenerating health meter. In short, one's health bar is divided into five equal sections. When one's health is depleated, it regenerates up to the next segment of the bar. If your health dips below the first health bar, you will begin to die unless you complete an animation that generally involves prying out a bullet using a knife and a leatherman. While it's a somewhat cool animation to see, it ends up being such a frequent occurance that what is at least a cursory nod towards realism becomes laughable. In the space of one extended gunfight, I pulled a round out of my hand, popped one out of my elbow, pulled a stick from my other arm, patted out a gasoline fire on my person and pried a bullet from my knee. Like the checkpoint system, the nod toward reality simply became an unnecessary burden. What's more, the combination of health concepts mean that inevitably problems occur. Now the player has two ways to regain health (health packs and pliers), and the ready supply of health around the world means that any benefit gained from having a finite amount of health (health is a resource expended during a well produced battle, and allows a designer one more tool to reward or punish players with) is immedieatly lost.
Then we have the enemy AI and it's effect on encounters. While the enemy AI is actually quite good, the problem is that certain parts of it are just a bit too good. For example, apparently their aim is astounding since they can, at a dead run, hit the player with regularity who is lying in the prone 300 yards away. Second, their capacity to "find" the player is simply astounding, and player quickly realizes there are only a handful of weapons that are even worth using. Unfortunately, good AI apparently precluded building interesting encounters and the developers instead hope that the AI soldiers themselves provide a memorable experience. Most of the time, they simply don't.
At the end of it all, I found that for everything the game did right, it did one or more things "wrong". The open world story is mired by gameplay lenthening contrivances and utterly fails to make me care for any faction, mission or story point. In the end, the game feels like one long series of side missions. The AI is good, often a bit too good which means that only certain play styles and weapons are well suited to most encounters. AI is used in place of design ingenuity and scripiting to build encounters, and while this helps ensure encounters play out differently it also means most of the time they are fairly dull and uninspired. The game has so many close brushes with greatness that I was left believing that it simply needed more time in the oven.
Were I asked for a recomendation on the game, I would only say "yes" if you had literally played and grown bored with virtually every other game released on your system of choice. There is fun to be had in the game, but it's doled out in such small portions and surrounded by so much crap that the nuggets o' goodness probably aren't worth looking for when so many other options exist.
) and i know there's mixed opinions about the game...
