Captivating story and visual style, memorable and fleshed-out characters, player choices, meaningful dialogues. Mostly frustration-free if you are ready to strain your brain a little. Common adventure game vices like pixel-hunting or combining random items till something works only on rarest of occasions. An excellent non-immersion-breaking system of hints - if you get stuck, your sidekick will throw a few ideas your way. Voice acting is also excellent. Overall an unforgettable game .
You are the commander of Antaeus, a high-tech cruiser that has been sunk in the last war and now lifted up from the bottom of the sea in a desperate attempt to stop a terrorist organization known as Cabal. The ship features a nano-factory, capable of producing helicopters, hovercraft and tanks almost instantly, given that you supply it with enough energy. For this purpose you will scavenge everything from cars to harbor cranes, take apart factories and clean up battlefields littered with remains of annihilated enemies. You will be accompanied by a crew of fallen soldiers, whose personality has been recorded using experimental technology. Each one of the soldiers at your disposal has his own set of traits and skills - one of them is an aggressive helicopter pilot, another excels in operating a howitzer... The crew members react on each other, scold the ones they don't like and praise the ones they do. The voice acting is great, the cinematic sequences are even better. The story sounds cheesy at first, but the little twists are good enough to keep you interested. The graphics is of course dated, but nevertheless very good. This might be just a personal choice, but I really like the clean look it has. If you dabble in 3D art yourself - draw inspiration from this game. What the artists could do with just a few dozen polygons per building/unit is amazing. The game environment is also fully destructible. PROS - Excellent gameplay - Great cinematic sequences and voice acting - Entertaining crew members - Completely destructible environment. From buildings to the last deckchair on the beach - if it's not terrain, you can blow it up CONS - Minor pathfinding and target priority problems - Despite all the effort missions might get a little repetitive at the end - The story seems a little naive in some aspects, but is mature in other - There really isn't much of a progression in weapons that can be equipped - Field of vision takes some getting used to Overall a great game.
