The game that wanted to be watched and not played
What bogs me the most is the cut scene heavy approach. When I buy a game, I want a pure, fun and interactive experience, unless the cut-scenes are truly engaging and important to the gameplay. Otherwise I'd prefer to just see a movie.
The game is constantly forcing you to watch long, pointless cut scenes, interrupted with short bursts of linear gameplay. In the end I would just leave the game playing these cutscenes for itself, make a sandwich or something, then come back to see if it was in the mood to actually let me play.
Even the gameplay sequences are heavily scripted and you have no real freedom. God forbid you actually play it in the way you want on the few levels that actually give you any real choices to move in multiple directions. If you try to do something the game designers do not like, you will soon get punished with a message saying "you wandered too far from your teammates" or something similar, and have to restart. This is a problem with heavily scripted games, you are commanded by the game designers to play it in a way to make sure you trigger all scripted sequences at the correct place and in the correct order.
The game can be quickly summarized as follows: Cutscene -> spawn an endless amount of enemies rushing to point A until you reach point B -> spawn an endless number of enemies rushing to point B until you reach point C -> Repeat x times -> cutscene.
Mix in some scripted events which is triggered as you move along for some artificial dramatic effect, and there you go.
The game tries to add some variation into the mix, like shooting things from a mounted gun on a moving vehicle, but nothing new to see here. Many of the more creative variations are simply asking you to press a key to trigger a scripted event anyway, like when you have to jump from a car to a moving train. You will get a "press space to jump" message, and if you press space within a reasonable amount of time you will successfully jump. Well, as entertaining as pressing space at the right time may be, it is really no replacement for real interactive gameplay.
I'm sure the multiplayer aspect is what gives the most value about this game. If you're into FPS multiplayer, which I am not, I suppose you will like it. But, as far as I know this game does not introduce anything new here. Just variations of what you have played a million times before.
The graphics is probably the strongest selling point of the game (apart from the brand). It looks fantastic, although it is plagued with the same issue most PC games are these days, a graphical dependency on aging game console hardware.
Although you can crank up the resolution and some settings on a powerful PC, I cannot help thinking it should be possible to squeeze much more out of a 3D engine on a modern game PC compared to aging game consoles. But, this issue is not related to this game, it is more of a game industry issue. Still, would like to see a game that would actually take full advantage of the new generations of PC hardware for a change. As for now, the game looks nice, but at the same time just a careful evolutionary improvement from before.