Well, I finished it, to my surprise… I guess I had gotten used to it never ending after a while. Here’s my quick thoughts as the credits are rolling… (although as they ended it seems like the game is not done so i don’t know what to believe…)
+, +, +, + the open world plus team recruiting gives you a reason to try all sorts of interesting stuff and explore giving a great feeling of freedom of approaching situations
-, -, – but a lot of that is gone in the main missions which often interrupt with arbitrary and weird moments
+, + a lot of music to collect
+, +, + has some interesting themes and decently deep thoughts on war, deterents, private militaries, even some semi-interesting ideas on biological warfare
-, -, -, -, – the main story is at times reaally kukugaga silly. Just ridikalikalika lous silly. Giant robots, kids, awkward lines, over the top dramatics about nothings, cardboard box weirdness… the game doesn’t take itself seriously quite often… and I can’t take it either if it can’t take itself seriously. I can really say about this game as an insult that it felt they were making the story as they went along, a little bit like a parent telling a fairy tale to a 3 year old, introducing huge radical changes or shockers just for the sake of shocking. For a few moments i thought they just introduced a few outrageous things but then they’d compensate with a lot of normality bringing believability but that train passed quickly and suddenly the whole central plotline and main characters were giant elephants standing on incredibly long and frail ant legs.
+, – funnily enough the game sometimes really shines as soon as the story ends as you can play with the fascinating simulation… but it would’ve been nice to be more than the simulation, or more content attached to the simulation (locations, situations…)
+ high production values everywhere, even in cheesy silly cinematics
+, +, + a lot of content, even after ending seems the game isn’t ended
-, -, -, + for the huge ammount of time you spend stealthing i was expecting a lot more interesting events to witness, more interesting conversations, original motion capture. The audio logs were an interesting thing (though some of them were also silly, and ridiculous) which helped, and even the 80s music was nice… if a bit complicated to get started/stopped/adjusted.
+, + the game is a lot of fun to experiment with the world,
+, +, – the environments are pretty interesting, though basically just 2 types and not very polished, I mean the textures and nice stones are there in Afganistan for example, but they feel somehow procedural/random, not caringly & lovingly designed & memorable
Conclusions: overall i’d give it a +2 on a -5 to 5 scale. Sometimes it really upset me with the silliness or with the arbitrary story constraints rezulting in extra frustation (giant robots, playing hide&seek with them in a small robot, fighting super fast kids…. that you aren’t allowed to use all your learned skills with, closing into weird areas after showing you the fun of choices), but there were also many hours of just fun experimenting with the world, sneaking around and doing interesting stuff. All in all i think this is a good game as seen just from the point of view of gameplay, but not in terms of content, it’s just that the gameplay is at times so revolutionary (it reminds me a bit of Shadow of Mordor) that it raises the bar higher for all games to come.
It was well done, fun open world choices even with some interesting themes sometimes, but then undermining all that with often very silly main story segments and just making stuff up as you went along destroying the slowly built believability of the universe it was creating.