Mostly competent but unremarkable
I'm going to be a little bit raw with this review. As a shooter, this game is merely competent. All of the weapons are useful but purely functional. The laser gun is somewhat unbalanced as it doesn't provide enough shots in its clip to match its utility. Dual wielding is fun and silly, but in the end it doesn't add much. Dual knives are rather fun on the lower difficulty levels, as you can sprint around killing people like a deranged beefcake ninja. But the scenarios you're presented with are completely utilitarian, with no real memorable moments. The entire game is spent in a linear corridor, even in the one instance in the beginning where you're outside in trenches. You move forward, kill whoever's there, then search for goodies. There's only a handful of alternate routes and secrets are not particularly challenging to find or rewarding.
For the stealth portion of the game, there's nothing here that's too interesting. The silent throwing knives have an arc which adds challenge (but that's a challenge you take on as you get a silencer for your pistol early), and commanders who can call in reinforcements could have produced an interesting twist. However, because you can't move bodies, guards can almost never see one another in their patrols, because that would make stealth too frustrating. That means that getting to a commander is exactly the same as working through any other stealth game, and they are simply another target to get to, like adding a sub-mission.
The AI is completely utilitarian, using exactly the same dumb algorithms every other shooter uses. There is nothing of note for any enemy encountered.
For the story, the vast majority of it is telling the exact same story dozens of war movies have told better, but there are moments where it goes completely off the rails. Conversations with the deranged outlaw psychohistorian Tekla touch on interesting subjects that have nothing to do with the story; I wish she were the love interest instead of the utterly bland Anya, who is given no personal agency whatsoever and spends most of the game sitting in a chair. The narrative is slapdash and rather nonsensical. For the first part of the game, you're trying to find some secret Jewish super-technology made by a group of peaceful Jewish technologists thousands of years ago (who never thought it might be a good idea to tell people not to brush their teeth with honey or how to stop the black plague). Once you do, it ends up being a spindly ball that causes about as much destruction as a ton of TNT. Apparently this was made as a toy. There's also a super armour suit that lets people jump fifty feet in the air and tear shit up but one of the other characters calls dibs so forget about that. Anyway, then you go to a submarine the size of an aircraft that you steal single-handedly, and then the moon, and then you go to a castle which is not Castle Wolfenstein and then you fight the boss man and then you sit there holding the feeble boss in your hands as he cycles through an animation and it prompts you to stab him a bunch of times because that's what you do in these games, you murder helpless people, that's your choice, that's your entire agency in this entire endeavour, to decide how long you wait before you murder someone. Then you get nuked, but you don't really because there's going to be a sequel, and there's a lady with a busted face in Berlin you need to go kill. It's pretty meaningless and arbitrary, though it does pretend to be deep and thoughtful by paraphrasing The New Colossus over footage of who cares what.
The one big trick is that you have a choice of which person you want to survive your first encounter with the big bad man, which creates a split timeline with different progressions. For some reason, this also means that you either have the ability to break electronic locks or mechanical locks, which creates some slight difference in how you go through levels. I haven't gone far through the alternate timeline, but it doesn't seem all that meaningful. It seems like it would be better to let the player open both types of locks so that there could be a little more variety to the game, as there's certainly nothing in the campaign that makes me want to play it twice. As I haven't gone far into it, there may be more of note to this element than I have seen.
Technically, it's id Tech 5. Walk by a column and objects flash into existence due to the abusive use of occlusion queries that some developers have decided is acceptable; you can even see behind doors if you do it fast enough. Turn around and textures pop in, or they don't and you're looking at something that looks like it's out of an early Spyro game on the PSX. Sometimes the engine gets confused and starts loading garbage into its pages, so square bits of the level geometry look completely wrong. Sometimes objects simply flash in and out of existence. And there seems to be some kind of leak, as the longer you play the game the more it will freak out when loading a level and flash back to Windows. I had to manually kill the process after one long session, with it taking up 3.4 GiB of memory, and it took Windows a few minutes to sort it all out. As with Rage, the compression used in storage makes dark areas look a mess, which they try to hide with a static filter, and the maximum resolution of any of the textures is woefully far below the screen resolution. John Carmack remains the greatest engine programmer to yet exist, but id Tech 5 is a stinker and it can't be fixed with him gone.
And as with any game made with this kind of stasis-obsessed engine, dynamism is greatly compromised, making the corridor shooting even blander. You can blow up some columns, some cover can be shot, nothing that wasn't in Ride to Hell: Retribution. Clutter isn't objects that can be pushed around by physics; it's all low-resolution textures splatted onto other objects that can't move. The lighting is okay but completely unremarkable, using little global illumination. Oh yeah, and it's 40 gigs, because that's what id Tech 5 does, it makes your game freaking huge. The sound is pretty weak; lots of sound effects are played too quietly, and it can be really hard to hear some lines of dialogue.
None of this adds up to a bad game. It's just a game you've played before, if you've played any other shooter.
