I liked playing the campaign, but I really had no idea what the heck was going on most of the time. It's a very linear story - you can't really make any decisions, and a lot of things make absolutely no sense.
I'm not really a big gamer. I'd consider myself mediocre at best when it comes to shooters, yet I was able to beat the game on high difficulty with pretty ridiculous ease. You have characters on your side who really don't seem to do much. They basically follow/lead you around but barely kill anything. Then they all die off one at a time in often unnecessary heroic deaths that mean absolutely nothing because there's next to no character development. They mostly lead you around and make dumb comments that are supposed to sound cool or be important, but I found them more irritating than anything else. I Half way through I just wished they'd shut up.
You take on the role of a captain of an enormous starship that looks capable of housing thousands of soldiers, yet somehow you're always the one doing highly risky ground missions with a handful of other characters. There are a dozen different aircraft in the starship hanger, yet for some reason, they can only deploy one or two at a time.
As captain, all the shooting is up to you. You will kill about 90% of the enemies to progress through the story while your crew follows you around killing the remaining 10%.
The game gets boring fast. Nearly all the missions follow the same structure:
- Choose a mission
- Walk to the elevator
- Go to the armory and pick out guns, customize them, etc. In the end, they all do pretty much the same thing. I really didn't care what guns I had because there weren't many distinguishing characteristics. They were all the same to me. Granted, there's snipers, pistols, automatics, etc. But really you can use any of them. It just doesn't matter.
- Walk to the elevator again
- Walk to your ship
- Take off, go on mission, kill all the enemies... repeat repeat repeat.
You can go on a mission and kill dozens of enemy units without a scratch, then the game plays some cutscene where you get slapped in the face and owned by the enemy. It just doesn't make sense.
The fighter planes looked pretty cool - but the mechanics behind using them was pretty stupid. It was difficult to tell where you were in the 3D space and most of the time I found myself just flying around randomly shooting whatever I saw. There was literally no strategy involved.
I could go on and on about all the things that don't make sense in this game world, but I'm tired of writing about it. So I'll summarize and end this review now.
This game had great graphics, and I did think it was fun shooting people... but at the end of the day the crappy story killed this game for me. I have absolutely no desire to play through it again. Thankfully the campaign is pathetically short so I didn't waste more of my life on this game.