Devastation

The Good
The graphics! Well, most of the graphics. Particularly the level design. Making your way through the destroyed city is really impressive eye-candy. With graphics maxed, you may find yourself getting shot in the head because you were busy staring at all the destruction surrounding you.

The story starts out interesting.

Physics are kind of neat. Pretty much anything in the game can be manipulated, shot around, kicked into the enemy, etc. The weapons are fun, with dual wielding all sorts of different guns, and a sniper rifle that can blow off the arms of your adversaries.

The Bad
The main character looks like Eminem. It's kind of hard to immerse yourself in a game when your roommates keeping joking about Eminem saving the post-apocalypse game.

But that didn't matter, really. Not far into the game the story is revealed to you, causing you to raise an eyebrow and wonder what the hell the writers were thinking. It would seem that in this devastated post-apocalypse world, the big bad corporations are using "trooper spawners" to uh...well, over-populate everyone else, I guess. Yeah, trooper-spawners. Machines that spawn troopers. To kill the rebels.

I found that I could no longer take this game at all seriously when the game goes from a dark and hopeless devastated post-apocalyptic barely-surviving world to a "kill teh trooper spawners!!1" arcade game. Yeah, I know, it was an ego-shooter long before you got to that point, but the game at least tried.

In later levels, even YOU get a trooper spawner yourself! So that when YOU die, you and your squadmates respawn. These levels are actually like an entertaining UT2003 game, but so completely distracting from any heart the game had prior. It's fun, I suppose, but like I said, if you were hoping for a story or any immersion, you'll hit a big brick wall around Chapter 2.

But enough about the unintentionally funny trooper spawner antics. There are dozens of other things that make this game kinda dumb. For instance, your squadmates are stupid as fuck, as is the norm really with computer games. They'll run right into battle and run around in circles as they get gunned down, or they'll jump into the ocean and get eaten by a shark. Pretty much anything that makes them completely useless and vunerable, they'll do at first opprotunity. I found it was much better to tell them to just sit their asses down while I do all the work, and even that didn't always work.

Voices and animation are pretty pathetic, too.

The Bottom Line
It starts out good enough, even if your character looks like a certain white rapper. And while the graphics are nice and the physics are interesting, the story dissolves into crap and it is impossible to take anything seriously that pits you against "trooper spawners".