Not to my surprise, another title with more money on advertising, rather than actual development.
This game teaches us one thing: the American soldier is the biggest grizzly bear that have ever entered mankind's cave and in case you are not an American who wets their pants every time you hear "God bless America!", then you should beware that fact, otherwise uncle Sam might decide to check your country for weapons of mass destruction!
I mean, come on, I lived in the States for two years and I love the place, as well as the people there, but this misguided patriotism is downright offensive jingoism, especially for nations to the east of Europe. There are plenty of people out there who have better things to do than suicide-bomb trains and no, there are no universities to prepare people for terrorist acts by training on dummy planes made of wood (as the game suggests it). If they had, what would the final exam for a Suicide Bombing class be, I wonder...
The wooden plane mission in the game was one point where I was literary laughing out loud but other instances failed even to be hilarious. For example, your ubersoldier protagonist can obviously withstand a direct sniper hit which only knocks him on the ground for a few seconds (how annoying!). Not to mention the hundreds of bullets he chews on which leaves him short of breath for a few seconds then he is ready to fight on. Or the fact that your squad mates have bottomless pockets full of ammo? Americans never die, unless scripted of course. Your teammates, even the nameless ones, sit on live grenades, and when you fail an objective to protect an American chopper from rocket launchers, the chopper just withdraws, radioing that it has sustained heavy damage, rather than explode as all good choppers do when hit by a rocket. When finally one from your squad is shot in the head for story purposes, heavy drama ensues involving weeping widows, dramatic burial processions and unhappy children, which, as all American propaganda teaches, is very bad for the sanctity of the family institution...
Anyway, I don't want this to be just a rant against US attempt at persuading its (future) taxpayers that military budget is money well spent. The truth is, the game would have been awful even if it was set on an alien conflict far into the future. Starting with levels, the level design is just bad. Some of the settings are brilliant but they all lack design. The hurricane-hit Philippines comes to mind. The level has no purpose whatsoever - you extract a handful of worthless hostages while supposedly hundreds of civilians die in the natural disaster. Design is terrible and overall it is just a good idea wasted.
Most levels suffer from poor design, actually. And when Danger Close ran out of bad ideas of their own, they borrowed a whole level from Modern Warfare (the ship assault in open sea) which you should never do from your direct competitor.
There are some free-roam driving sections which a lot of people seem to like but I find them poorly implemented. The driving mechanics suck and the authors borrowed some ideas here as well (at least this time it is from fellow developers under EA's hat). For example, in one car chase chapter, you observe the totaling of pursuing cars a la Hot Pursuit style or hide from them a la Most Wanted style. Hell, they even labeled one of the levels "Hot Pursuit".
Throw in some random ideas like upgrading your door breach mechanics with different gadgets which literary don't improve anything at all, just look different.
There are plenty of bugs as well, starting from poor AI which sometimes takes cover behind thin air, sometimes goes through you without seeing you or just as well turns around and shoots you in the face when you thought you are sneaking stealthily. Clipping issues are ubiquitous. Enemies get stuck into walls or develop some kind of a speed hack syndrome when rushing for cover. Allies are no better. They push you out of cover or get in your line of fire. But the funniest part is gunning someone down while his rifle stays flipping in the air. Sometimes it may keep on shooting, too! The armada of bugs is topped by black screens, game freezes and CTDs.
The game offers you a menu where you can assign key configurations like pretty much all games do, but Warfighter does it in such a terrible way that redefining keys becomes a nightmare and if you prefer other settings like me, you are forced to just give up and play with the configuration the developers intended.
Did I mention that the game is linear, like a ruler? Even in large rooms you usually have a zigzag route preset by turned furniture. It is even funnier how the game shows you sneaking behind an unsuspecting enemy and you are ordered to headshot him. You may wish to look aside, but you cannot. Your movement is restrained by the imaginary boundaries set by the enemy's head and your crosshair pointing directly at it.
Characters and plot are flat. The narration uses heavy military jargon which is hard to understand. I spent three missions or so looking for "P.M.A.S." (or something like that). What the hell? People have no names, just nicknames and the game reminds us of some characters from the previous Medal of Honor game which had to make my balls tingle, I suppose, but I never cared about them enough to remember them anyway. Only the swearing Serb arms dealer was a fresh, but brief entry with his native "pichka ti materina" lines addressed at my squad. He was truly swearing like a Serb and if you've never heard a Serb swearing, just google it. I'm sure there are plenty of jokes about that on the net.
One good thing I can say is that graphics are beautiful. However, the game is poorly optimized and runs slowly unless you have a $3000 rig. I don't have the best computer in the world, but I am pretty sure i7, 8 GB of RAM and 660GTX should be able to squeeze more than 18-20 fps out of this game. They didn't (on medium).
Due to the low fps, I haven't really tried multiplayer. I hear it might potentially rise the final score a little bit but it is nothing groundbreaking.
Overall, this game is just another weekend shooter, but its pretense turns it into a laughingstock. I don't mind superheroes in all other games but don't advertise it like "realistic", please! The way terrorism is portrayed here, should be considered an offence to gamers' intelligence (and Americans' intelligence for that matter). "Inspired by actual events" the game keeps reminding us at the beginning of every level, lest we forget...