Any potential this six hour game has doesn't make up for its brain dead story, weak gunplay, and frustrating endgame.
In Psi-Ops players assume the role of Jack Scryer a secret government agent sent undercover to infiltrate an organization known as "the movement". The twist is that Jack is an agent of a secret branch of the military called Mindgate that was founded during the cold war to research and develop soldiers with various psychic abilities. To get him successfully into The Movement however Jack undergoes a complete memory wipe in the opening cinematic which robs him of his abilities alongside his memories. Suffice it to say that if your playing Psi-Ops your doing so to enjoy the gameplay rather then it's plot which is horrible at best. The characters and dialog are terrible and cliché; the story as a whole is something that only people under the age of twenty will be able to remotely enjoy. To give another example the main villain, the leader of the creatively named "movement", is simply called The General. He has no real name and he doesn't need one because giving him won't make the story suck less. To reiterate; the plot was written to be enjoyed by fifteen year olds and people with similar intelligence/maturity levels.
That said the only real reason to play Psi-Ops is for it's third person shooter gameplay made original with it's use of various psychic abilities. Jack has a number of tricks up his sleeve including the ability to lift and throw things, draining enemies to regain psychic energy, scouting areas without actually entering, taking control of most enemies, and setting things on fire. When the game is at it's best your throwing things around, setting people on fire, and and draining the energy out of peoples bodies until their heads literally explode. Sadly the game isn't at it's best very often and all that potential is wasted by frequent frustrating encounters and enemies that just feel cheap rather then genuinely challenging. As soon as you start getting used to your powers the game starts throwing enemies at you that aren't affected by most of them. Towards the end of the game you start coming up against invisible enemies, invisible mines that kill you if you make contact with them, and the final stretch only features those enemies that can't be mind controlled or thrown. This wouldn't be so bad if traditional weapons were enjoyable to use but for the most part they aren't. Jack manually reloads his weapons if he is left standing for a few seconds but in the heat of the most intense battles you just end up running around waiting for a chance to stand still and reload. The game tries to offset this by handing out healing and psi recharging items all over the place but that just makes the game painfully easy. The final stretch of the game is more an exercise in frustration saved by the fact that the game as a whole is woefully short. In fact the final boss is pathetically easy compared the the level leading up to him. I clocked in at around six hours but that doesn't include time spend replaying areas due to cheap deaths and a console style checkpoint save system. There are a number of bonus missions that can be unlocked by tracking down lawn gnomes hidden throughout the six stages the game has to offer but by the time the end credits had finished rolling I was just in a hurry to uninstall the game.
Visually Psi-Ops is competent but doesn't really impress. It's obvious it's a port of a console game and the developers haven't done anything in the vein of higher resolution textures or higher poly counts for character models. The game doesn't look bad it just looks inferior to games actually developed for PC. As far as the sound department is concerned the score is instantly forgettable and as I previously mentioned the voice acting is laughable.
Those of you that might pick up this game thinking gunplay will be superior to it's console version will be sorely disappointed. While aiming is done with the mouse the console "auto away" aim is in full effect. So you might have your cross hairs directly over the head but the gun will miss anyway about half the time. I also noticed significant stuttering at random times on my rig which can run much more demanding games without issues. There were also a few visual issues in one area and a few crashes to desktop for reasons I was unable to determine.
If you can get past the brain dead cliched story there is fun to be had here. That said if you are going to play Psi-Ops then your better off playing it's original console versions as there are no benefits to playing it on PC. That said, if your wanting to play a 3rd person action game that involves throwing things around your better off picking up something from the Jedi Knight series for PC. Psi-Ops has it's moments but they are too few in a game that you'll likely be finished with in under ten hours.