Finished this today. For a two-disc game, it was surprisingly pretty short. I clocked in nine hours overall, but a good hour of that was probably from leaving it paused while I was eating or smoking. The game was fun enough, but it was admittedly pretty disappointing given my expectations for it. The action was solid, the shooting was pretty generic stuff, although the AI left a little to be desired. For the most part they just stood in cover and popped up and down waiting for you to pick them off. The driving was initially more fun than I expected it to be, but after a while it got kind of tiring.
I feel like I'm selling it short a bit, the gameplay is what made it really fun for me and I wouldn't have played nine hours if it wasn't engaging the way it was. Also, graphically it was astounding. Honestly the graphics may just be the finest I've seen up to this point. Just really great stuff all the time, on that front.The boss battles were really generic stuff, I kind of wish they hadn't included them because they made you expect a little more and it ended up just being the same kind of fight just with a health bar on the bad guy.
The thing that really holds the game back, aside from the brief playtime, is the story. A lot of people have complained about it and I'm definitely one of them. It takes the entire first disc to really get into the meat of the story, and the second disc is probably only two, maybe three hours worth of gameplay in the main storyline. The ending really leaves you hanging and isn't climatic at all. Like I said, it takes so long for the story to get going. Obviously the entire thing is a setup for a franchise, or at least one sequel, which I think is kind of a ripoff. It feels cheap to play the entire thing just to find out that it's basically the prologue to the actual story which we're not going to see for a while. But I guess in this day and age it's pretty hard to find something that is just a stand-alone game.
I feel like I'm selling it short a bit, the gameplay is what made it really fun for me and I wouldn't have played nine hours if it wasn't engaging the way it was. Also, graphically it was astounding. Honestly the graphics may just be the finest I've seen up to this point. Just really great stuff all the time, on that front.The boss battles were really generic stuff, I kind of wish they hadn't included them because they made you expect a little more and it ended up just being the same kind of fight just with a health bar on the bad guy.
The thing that really holds the game back, aside from the brief playtime, is the story. A lot of people have complained about it and I'm definitely one of them. It takes the entire first disc to really get into the meat of the story, and the second disc is probably only two, maybe three hours worth of gameplay in the main storyline. The ending really leaves you hanging and isn't climatic at all. Like I said, it takes so long for the story to get going. Obviously the entire thing is a setup for a franchise, or at least one sequel, which I think is kind of a ripoff. It feels cheap to play the entire thing just to find out that it's basically the prologue to the actual story which we're not going to see for a while. But I guess in this day and age it's pretty hard to find something that is just a stand-alone game.