A flawed little gem, play it with the Improvement Project mod available on moddb for the best experience and to remove many of the annoyances other reviewers have criticized the game for.
Completed the game with about 60% achivements unlocked. I will be honest I did not expect the game to be so fun. It is basically farcry 2 but without the flamethrower and a cool sniper mechanics instead. You have an open world, that doesn't really bring anything other than having some boxes with collectibles hidden here and there, but it's enjoyable to drive around, the the setting is really well designed. The graphics over all hold up really well IMO. You can see the game has it's years, but it's still looking good. The story is decent, althought there were moments where I laughed because of the delivery. If you treat it as a pulpy soldier adventure it's okey. It's really good in fullfiling that macho man power fantasy actually and I liked that a lot to be honest. As for the gameplay it's really good. The gunplay is top notch, using the sniper rifle to clear out an outpost of the bad guys from afar is very satisfiing. You also have some cool tools at your disposal, like the drone, or special ammo to scout ahead. The locations of the missions are well designed, with many paths to your objective, which I appreciated a lot. I played on the middle difficulty and it was okey for me, not insanely hard, but not too easy, there were missions that I had to take multiple tries but was never frustrated bc I felt it wasdue to my mistakes and not the game being unfair. The enemy AI is okey, there some quirks ofc, but it's nothing you can abuse, In general they will react to bodies, sounds and will spot you if you are in the open. If you are sniping them, they will take cover and try to reach you without showing themselves. I was happy with that. Now there are some bad parts as well. The game crashed on me a couple of times, but other then that I did not experienced any major bugs. Sometimes the savepoints are quite far apart and if you fail you need to retrace but it's nothing too atrocious. All in all, I will be picking up the other parts of the series :)
Overall this game is so so but for the sale price has been entertaining enough. Overall it's a pretty straightforward entry in it's genre and might scratch that itch for running around putting bullets in peoples heads.
While the overall product is a bit lackluster it suffers from a lot of little annoyances or inconsistencies. things like "loot body" and "swap gun" being the same keybind are just annoying . "all enemies drop their weapons except the super soldiers whose guns mysteriously vanish when you kill them" are just lazy.
The story is pretty run of the mill. the game is also pretty janky. There's points of interest I can't complete since the item I think fell through the floor, and one won't trigger the complete condition. I've fallen through the ground, been stuck in the terrain over a dozen times. had missions skip portions and functions stop working. Enemies despawning or respawning oddly at a distance (not good for a sniping game where you're encouraged to be at a distance). Also I keep mysteriously loosing healing items despite never using them.
that said it's not all bad. I like the drone mechanic for surveying and it's pretty fun sneaking up to a ridge and popping people, grab it on sale and don't expect AAA out of it and you'll get your money's worth.