Imagine if someone asked you to choreograph a takedown of your local hardware store, blueprints and all. They tell you there are three rooms you need to raid all at once or in rapid succession, and getting to those rooms requires eight people to all sieze a number of different areas with deadly accuracy all at the same time. Oh and the rooms in question contain people with guns to their heads so you need to be maddeningly careful and precise. This game, after 20 years of video game evolution, is still incredibly heart-pounding and intense while your mission is underway. After you give that first go-code and the siege quietly starts, you are praying to god you don't flinch and make a mistake, lest you or members of your squad end up dead. You pray your plan is tight and that noone's walking into a massacre, or that the hostage-room-raid doesn't go bad. Because if it does, that's a lot of hard work for nothing, and a plan you must tweak and repeat. If your plan doesn't account for a sensitive area where a man could be waiting for you to pass, he will end your life before you have a chance to figure out where he was, and you'll have to send another team to clean up the mess. Encountering your previous team's bodies (who you may have been controlling at the time of their demise) is very demoralizing. And that is assuming you didn't end the mission because you are okay playing the rest of the campaign with a reduced main character roster, as dead characters stay dead for the rest of the game; You will never be able to assign them to your plan again. It adds a whole new sense of dread at the idea of a plan going awry. The game isn't just a shooter, but it is a game about choreographing an entire routine, like a dance number. Unlike modern games where it is linear and you have a direction to go in, here you have a maddeningly large expanse of area to comprehend; you get a building or facility, and all its entrances, and you must figure out a complete and total siege.
Give this game Oculus Rift compatibility, and my life as a gamer will be complete. I wanna look up at a Star Destroyer that just came out of hyperspace right over my head, and soil my pants. Until then, 4 stars.
