Especially for a shooter of the early 2000s, this mostly holds up. The sounds, voices, and music are all perfectly Star Wars, and the attention to detail is epic: I especially love when you kill someone in close range and they splatter your visor with goo (or oil, if it's a droid), only for a sci fi window wiper to clean your vision again after a few seconds. The only thing that holds it back for me is there's not a lot of enemy variety and it does start to get fairly repetitive. But for all that, the action is fun and intense, and the squad commands give it an extra layer of immersion (it's really not THAT tactical as far as shooters go, but it's still fun to be a squad leader).
This isn't the best 3rd person shooter, stealth game, or even psychic action game you'll ever play, even from it's era, but the sci fi conspiracy action thriller storyline is an absolute delight, and has me playing this game once every few years like a good movie. Probably more of a 4/5 but I really dig it. Try to ignore how utterly bleak the cover art looks: this game is a romp. It was developed by Free Radical, making it one of their few non-Timesplitters games, and while the gameplay has nothing in common with that series, the expressive, cartoony character animations and Paul Verhoven inspired storyline are right up their alley. It both knows how to not take itself too seriously and have fun, while also loving the world and the characters they're playing with. You're John Vattic, an amnesiac waking up in a government testing lab with fun and dangerous psychic abilities. As you break out and become a man on the run, you gradually get your memories back of a classified operation in Russia, and the dark secrets of what happened there... They do a great job of keeping you interested in what's going to happen next, and even a good job keeping the story twisty and mysterious. They do a good job encouraging you to be stealthy and making Vattic not be an absolute tank, but you can still power trip your way through the game if you want. One my favorite design choices about the stealth is that, like Metal Gear Solid, you can royally mess up a stealth sequence, get caught in a massive shootout and murder a hundred respawning dudes, and then when no one's looking, hop into a closet and wait 10 seconds or so for the all clear. It keeps things from getting too frustrating, if not all that challenging (but again, you're playing this for the story). It's also not terribly long, maybe 7 hours or so, which feels just right for the kind of game it is. This is an easy recommend for me, especially if you like story driven games or have some nostalgia for the PS2 era of games.
The swan song of Pandemic Studios. They always made fun games (Battlefront being my favorites). What you've got here combines some of Pandemic's own Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (blow lots of stuff up, get money from said explosions to buy more explosives, repeat), a little Grand Theft Auto (set in am open world sandbox of a real world city, allowing you to steal various vehicles and raise your wanted level) and a touch of Assassin's Creed (climb buildings, assassinate targets, blend in with disguises). And look, it's a little clunky in the execution here and there; the open world sandbox, while packed with stuff to blow up, isn't as rich or lifelike as some games even from it's own time. The stealth can fall apart pretty quickly, and then you just have to blow everyone to hell. The story's merely alright, neither offensive nor particularly engaging. But I'm 11 hours in and still want to unlock more ways to blow up Nazis (or shoot them, or shank them, or run them over--the possibilities never stop being fun, and the game incentivizes diversity). It's not terribly deep but the core mechanics are satisfying. Well worth the price of admission.
