Am I missing something?
But the games other problems quickly became too obvious to ignore. One of the biggest problems with this game is that it's so unbalanced; here's what I mean: at first your guns are way underpowered, very quickly, they become overpowered and two shots from a pistol put down the dog that took four shotgun blasts to put down not more than 20 minutes prior. However, not more than an hour later you're supposed to go kill these two guys that are practically invulnerable, one of them is a guy named bone head, I can't remember the other one. So I ran up to him, hit berserker mode and just wailed on him while my friend, the soldier, blasted away. We were dying very quickly and that's when we realized his health was going down so slowly, we'd have to unload all our ammo, from every gun, and he still probably wouldn't be dead; but we would be, many times over. Even his steroided up henchmen were impossible to kill; same thing, just putting clip after clip into them and their health is maybe 10% gone, am I missing something!? Add to it that each time you respawn a half a mile away, you get to fight the same group of soldiers, again, before you get to the guy you're supposed to kill, whose small amount of health you took away last time is recharged.
The enemies are the next biggest problem, in the few hours we played, we fought two whole main enemies: dogs, and soldiers that all look exactly the same. Aside from looking identical, the soldiers have the worst AI of any soldier I've seen in ten years. They remind me of the guys in goldeneye for the N64, they don't seek cover, they don't flank you, they don't use tactics of any kind. All they do is stand there and shoot, then they walk to the left while shooting, then they stop, then they walk to the right while shooting, then they stop, then they repeat the pattern. At least the guys in goldeneye kneeled down every once in a while. The other enemies in the game just bum rush you, forcing you to fight at point blank range, which is not only a terrible game design, but since most likely it'll take 2,000 rounds or so to put down a single enemy, and the fact that you have half a dozen or so attacking, and you can't recharge your shield since they're all attacking, you're just going to die, over and over again.
The pointless side missions, that I mentioned briefly are another huge problem with this game, they simply don't fit. A lot of other games have side missions, but they just make sense, like fallout for example. But here they feel like they were just thrown in to detract from the fact that there is no real story, and a game that lacks a compelling story doesn't deserve to distract you with side missions. Side missions are supposed to add depth to the game, not just add playing time. Besides, you're a merc, you don't go to the grocery shopping for some guy to get information out of him, you beat the information out of him! Add to this the fact that you don't really know what you're supposed to be doing aside from looking for some vault, and the tedious running back and forth from point A to point B and back to point A again, dying the whole way, and it all gets pretty pointless feeling pretty quickly.
So, recap, the enemies are either way over or underpowered, they're boring to fight and use no tactics, the missions involve getting food and flowers, there's no sense of direction or purpose to the game, and very quickly you'll hit a wall where you'll just keep dying over and over again. I know I titled this "am I missing something?" but it should be somethings, because there's a lot wrong with this game and very little that's right. But if I am missing something that'll change everything, or even most things, that I've ranted about here, please, feel free to tell me, because it is possible that I've simply missed something. But honestly, I don't think so, since even in walkthrough videos I've watched the person experiences the same run, shoot, do no damage, then die pattern we experienced. In short: total freakin' letdown.