Does running around blowing things up, riding helicopters, jumping from
car to car and parachuting from jets in a 10000 km squared tropical
island sound good to you? Well, then this is the game for you. It does
lack a serious, long story and is flawed, but is still fun in many
ways.
Let me start with the story. The setting is great; a tropical
island ruled by a political tyrant. But once you actually get into the
story it isn't so fun with a boring script, an unlikable main character
and pretty underwhelming cinematics. So the story isn't great and it
doesn't really spoil the game, but hopefully in the second game they will improve this small hindrance. So the
campaign is satisfactory at best and it quite easy to get through, but
instead of getting harder as you get through, it just gets longer. It
also involves a lot of getting from point A to B and then to C and back
to A.
Getting from the different missions can take a while,
even by plane, but Avalanche have inserted a nice touch where you can
either get your "agency" to drop you a vehicle wherever you are or get
them to pick you up and drop you off at one of the numerous bases or
campaign mission starting points. The side missions, involving helping
the guerrillas and the drug baron, are different. While helping the
guerrillas you liberate villages and towns by creating havoc, which is
quite fun. But the rest of the normal missions (as well as the drug
baron missions) get boring and unoriginal fast. Though I have been
complaining a lot there are some fantastic ideas and other stuff which
work really well. Being a one man army is great in some ways, because
you can survive barrages of bullets and fall from great heights, you
can jump out of a plane and hang on the tail or you can get in a super
fast bike go off and cliff and pull out your parachute just before
falling to a bloody mess. Being able to always fling yourself into the air makes you feel like a kind of superman, with guns.
The game
looks fantastic especially when the sun rises or sets, and there is
only about a 10 second loading screen at the beginning with no stopping
for buffering as you fly through the huge island. If anything I would
like to see the amazing engine sold to some other publishers.
I think
Avalance have put a lot of effort into this but they just haven't put
it together, this could have been a classic. All they really need is a
better mission structure and perhaps a more detailed and smaller island
with more going on. Maybe even a better story. Also, the gameplay is
okay and not fitted really for keyboard and mouse and so if somebody
has an xbox 360 as well as their PC, get the xbox 360 version instead. If you see this in a bargin bin, pick it up!
