The future of war meets the future of gaming...
To start from the beggining, anyone who says that this isn't one of the top 5 or 10 graphically impressive games of all time, needs to change the channel, because they must not be looking at same game I'm looking at. Every little aspect of detail was both well thought out, and then well executed by Ubi-Soft. The player models, the lighting, the shadows, the sky, all of this is so well done it still blows my mind to this day that video games have come this far. It doesn't matter if it's night or day out, the game looks simply astounding in any light.
There's not slouching in the gameplay aspect either, as the game handles about as well if not better, then any other shooter to come to the market as of thus far. The weapons look real, and they have the feel and sound of the real thing as well. The peeking system that allows you to hide and pop up only for a split second to fire off a short burst, is heavily used in this game as about every firefight requires you to find some cover and plot your approach from there. The camera system used on your HUD is also useful in planning an approach, but it does have it's drawbacks, and it's very hard to make out enemies on such a small screen. The enemy AI is smart, and they also will find cover, and come at you in numbers. To say the game is not challenging, especially on the hard difficulty, would be a horrible misrepresentation of the gameplay. It's meant to be challanging, and it succeeds on most missions.
The modes are deep, and you have two campaigns to chose from. There is the main campaign that most people play that goes through the small cutscenes that put you in the chopper before a mission gathering intel. Then there's also the secondary campaign which will take longer to get through, but I think it was mostly meant to be played in multi-player, as the objectives are very simple, but take a long time to carry out. Either way, the single-player missions by themselves will keep you busy for quite some time, and if they don't... Then hop on-line because there is much fun to be had there as well. This really is a game that doesn't get boring after many hours of on-line play. While I don't say the play is worthy of Halo 2, it still will keep you occupied for many hours at a time.
Overall the single player missions are better drawn out due to the controls, but the multi-player campaign is fun also, and the on-line play rocks. If you're a fan of Clancy games, or just shooters in general, this game should float your boat, and I have to bow down to Ubi-Soft for bringing us this one, as they really have created a work of art. Other than some minor AI flaws, the game has absolutely no glaring holes, and it is easily worthy of being nominated for one of my games of the year. Buy it, and buy it now... You won't regret it.