The amount of one-star reviews on this game sadly reflects the fanboy elitism element of the GoG community. Anyone who is here just to buy games, looking for a blast from the past, please ignore the haters. The true meat of the game is this: it's a modernized version of Hidden & Dangerous set in 1991. It copies mechanics from H&D exactly. If you have played Hidden & Dangerous before, you know precisely what kind of game is going to be, and if you liked H&D, you will love this game. This game was a favorite of mine growing up. The very familiar Desert Storm aesthetic combined with an emphasis on planning and tactics as opposed to running and gunning is what caught me. The game features a great variety of weapons and equipment, much more so than H&D. The enemy AI is of the "shoot at you for a bit, then charge directly at you" variety, unfortunately. The most annoying feature of the game, regarding the AI, is that once an alarm sounds, enemy soldiers will constantly respawn until you reach the next area. This can be very frustrating and immersion-breaking at times. Continuing the comparison to H&D, there is no planning stage, inventories are not customizable before the mission, and all missions are played out in a linear fashion. The missions generally revolve around moving to an objective, taking out small enemy patrols along the way, and then once there, positioning your men to best defend the area as the objective is completed, and then retreating all of your men safely in order to reach and extraction point. It's not nearly as in depth as something like Ghost Recon, but when it works, it really works. Unfortunately when it doesn't, it involves seeing enemies respawn directly in front of your face as you move through an already cleared area searching for a very vague objective. If you can get past its shortcomings, the game provides a rewarding and fun experience, highly reminiscent of Hidden & Dangerous, that really takes you back to the far away time of 2002 (heh!). If you are a fan of squad-based shooters, take a spin on the direct descendant of the grand-daddy of them all. After this, you might want to check out it's own offspring, Full Spectrum Warrior.
