A Combustible Lemon wrote:If anyone who's played it has a review, post it here so people want to play it or whatever.
Well,
fine, since you asked.
I don't know that I would call it the greatest military shooter of all time, so much as a candidate for the greatest military shooter
story of all time. And I think most everyone who's played it would agree -- the gameplay is kind of shitty and generic 90% of the time. It's certainly by design to trick unaware players into a false sense of security, but the fact remains that unlike the other games you named, it's not all that fun to actually play for the most part; most of the environments are the same gorgeous-but-lifeless sandy city street, most of the shootouts play out almost identically, and there are very few standout setpiece moments that actually involve the basic gameplay mechanics (the only time I can recall that the shooting gameplay is used to great effect is in two of the four endings).
But all that's to say that I still consider it one of my favorite games ever, solely because the story and how it's implemented absolutely rocks. It doesn't start to get visibly compelling until after the halfway turning point (and the infamous "white phosphorous" scene almost everyone has at least heard about by now), but even the setup becomes pretty brilliant in retrospect once the meta shit kicks in. Said meta shit is indeed downplayed compared to something like
Doki Doki, but it provides a fascinating examination of player agency, completionism, and relative morality, more along the lines of a more brutal
Bioshock if
Bioshock had kept digging into all of its "would you kindly?" stuff instead of dragging on to a painful and generic third act where nothing happens (hey, it's kind of like a reverse
Bioshock then). The entire latter half is pretty much nonstop sadistic encounters and choices mixed in with the subpar gameplay, leading up to one of my favorite game finales and a rare choice of endings where all four are equally fitting resolutions.
It's certainly not for everyone -- those who get annoyed instead of impacted when a game tells you you did a bad thing, or those who don't tend to feel empathy for game characters because they're not real, will most likely be in the crowd that finds the story pretentious and pointless -- but I personally can't recommend it highly enough.