Some call it a shooter. Some call it survival horror. I call it garbage.
What the game gets right:
Little, and I mean very little. The concept of humans being forced to live underground while post apocalyptic creatures roam the surface is a good one, and seems like something that may actually happen within the next 20 years anyway. Shame that the creatures were rather dull and uninspired, and not nearly enough time is spent on the surface. Most of your time will be spent roaming pitch, and I mean pitch black tunnels fighting other human NPC's. You'll fight a colony of thieves, fellow Russians fighting for power, and what's a shooter without Nazi's right? So of course, they make an annoying appearance as well. Seems that even in the face of extinction humans will continue to kill each other. Plausible.
What the game gets wrong:
Everything else. The weapons are very dull, unrealistic sounding, and just don't pack that 'umph' you get when firing a heavy weapon in say, a good game, such as CoD or Bad Company. You'll often find yourself having to shoot every enemy a good 5 - 10 times before they die, and this includes head shots. Of course you can load your puny guns with 'special' ammo (ammo made pre-apocalypse) which also happens to be what people now use for currency, so you're literally blowing your money away (much like anyone who buys this game).
The check points often leave you in horrible positions and sometimes this will force you to restart a level from the beginning. I remember one section being pinned down by some sort of Nazi rail riding buggy with a mounted machine gun that killed me in 0.5 seconds every time I respawned, forcing me to redo the level from the beginning, and what an annoying level it was. The second time around, I managed to shoot the driver of the bugger, and ran up to the gunner so he was unable to hit me. I must have let out a good 30 rounds into his head, chest and crotch, and he kept on shooting at nothing like an indestructible idiot. As stupid as they may be, the enemies have the accuracy of God if he were to become a sniper. This is very annoying to the point where there just isn't enough to keep you to want playing. Most of the time I'd redo a section just for principal and forget what the hell my 'story objective' was, nor did I care. The story itself is rather boring and generic in the way that" the fate of the human race rests on your shoulders." Wow. I've never heard that one before...
There are also some bugs which should be addressed. I found myself crawling in the dark using sub par night vision goggles (which you have to charge with a crank battery every 5 - 10 minutes. this also applies to your dinky little flashlight) only to get stuck in a wall, which again forces you to restart. Getting back to the night vision goggles; they suck. The firefights are chock full of smoke and the goggles won't see through smoke, so instead of having some advantage over your enemy, you will usually just see a bright glowing cloud of green smoke, behind which bullets will be flying towards you with superior accuracy. Other areas are 'toxic' and require you to put on a gas mask, which is done by pressing down on the D pad. It would take about 10 tries before it actually worked, as the game sensed my 'down' and a 'left' or 'right' which is what you press to cycle through your crappy assortment of weapons.
Other stupid things that annoyed me. You could duck behind a barrel with an enemy shooting at you for 20 minutes, but if you, by some chance of random luck, manage to kill this enemy, you'll find about 5 bullets to loot from his body, and when each enemy takes a good 8 or 9 shots to even consider dying, you run out of ammo, a lot. I've also thrown lit sticks of dynamite at an the foot of an enemy, and he just stood there without a scratch as it blew up. Perhaps I was throwing a firecracker?
The darkness, ohhhh, the darkness. I enjoy games that are dark. I enjoy playing F.E.A.R and it's sequels, I enjoyed Condemned, I enjoyed (most of) the Silent Hill games, and some older titles like the Penumbra series. The darkness in those games set an atmosphere that was immersive and when played with the lights out and the sound up, they were downright scary. The darkness in this game just makes you feel like your TV is messed up or you have poor eyesight. Try shooting through poorly designed night vision goggles through clouds of glowing smoke while wearing a cracked gas mask (which causes your side vision to blur, and the cracks can be very large and obstructing) and you're left with more frustration over fun. The sound doesn't help much either. The voices of the enemy (who say the same 5 lines over and over and over, some of which include the 'F' word, oooooooooh) in a game can usually tell you from which direction they are. In this game, they can sound like they're right behind your left ear, when really they're all the way down a tunnel to your right. Often I would hear the 'tssssss' sound of a burning fuse, thinking someone had thrown dynamite my way, but it was just a glitch. I would run back and forth over the same spot, with no enemies around, and every time my feet his that spot, the sound would spark. It's things like that which should be polished off before a game hits shelves, otherwise games wind up hitting bargain bins.
Overall, I truly do hate this game. I know a lot of people like it, but I simply cannot bandwagon a horrible title just because the majority thinks otherwise. I mean, millions of people buy the Wii too and I wouldn't invest a dime into that thing, but that's another story...