Halo rip-off
Okay, it's not exactly Halo. There's a bit of Half-Life in there too. But it's mostly just Halo. Same obnoxiously huge reticle, same weak-feeling assault rifle, same awkward vehicle sections, same linear level design with illusions of intricacy and openness, same orchestral militaristic kind of soundtrack.
FWIW though, I think it does at least as good of a job as Halo at doing all this. Which isn't good news to me, but I imagine hungry Halo fans might enjoy this.
I did enjoy the combat slightly more here (and I mean slightly), mainly cause your reticle actually does shrink when you crouch or aim down sights. It's still huge though, and the enemies feel a bit tanky, mainly because it's near-impossible to land headshots. The physics are also pretty nice, you can destroy parts of the environment and there's a nice ragdoll, also enemy helmets can satisfyingly break with pieces of glass flying everywhere. Oh yeah, also they're not Pixar cartoons, although here it might be a bad thing because it means less variety and more hitscanning.
After a while I kinda found a bit of a flow, but it kept breaking up because of the lack of manual saves. Sometimes you'd die from something silly, like being hit by a vehicle, and then you have to go back to the checkpoint and replay the battle you've just won. This is kinda where this game lost me.
What a disappointment. I've been wanting to play this game since 2004 when I saw an article about it in a magazine and was amazed by the graphics (those are indeed really nice, Unreal 2 at work here). And after I played and became a fan of Dark Sector and The Darkness 2, my desire to check other works by Digital Extremes grew even stronger. That combined with me already being a fan of Unreal, UT99, UT2004 (and I even remember having fun with Warpath) made this a high priority game to check out. But alas this feels nothing like other Digital Extremes project. This is really more of a soulless commercial cashgrab aiming to capitalize on the popularity of Halo.