💎 PREMIUM: App/ - Collection

Very good game. Please like this so i can get a badge

First off, I do actually like the game.
Why the negative review, you might ask?

Pros:
- Fantastic gameplay
- Great stealth
- Better recon and scouting than every Ghost Recon game
- Decent gunplay
- Brilliant optimization

Cons:
- Story is convoluted garbage
- Audio is abysmal
- It is so very tedious to load into missions
- Development is tiresome
- So much visual clutter

Pros Explanation:

Gameplay - The gameplay is great. Snake feels.. fine, in movement, but the variation in approach and open-ended-ness of missions is amazing. Feels like Dishonored if it was a military open-world third person shooter.
Stealth - The stealth is great. It's punishing, enemies adapt to your style of play over the course of the missions. For instance, killing everything head on with an LMG will lead to enemies using riot shields and heavy armor, while stealthing everything at night will give them night vision goggles and make them do everything in pairs.
Recon - You can actually scout out an area. Revolutionary, right? But seriously, the amount of satisfaction you get by marking everyone with binos is unmatched. A lot better than just getting a drone out and doing it like that. You actually have to find vantage points.
Gunplay - Gunplay is.. fine. Every assault rifle feels more or less the same. There are three different kinds of shotguns - pump action, semi auto, and full auto. Two different kinds of rifles - bolt action and semi auto. Lock on missile launchers and manual. Full auto pistols, manual chamber tranquilisers, the like. You can't shoot anything when driving a vehicle, though, and vehicles were already too floaty for my liking. It's fine. It's no SCP: Secret Laboratory. /s
Optimisation - I played this at 1080p 60FPS on all Medium settings with Volumetric Clouds, DoF, and motion blur turned off. Intel Core i5-4460, 4 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650. Potato. It's really well optimised, and even has mods that make it even better by removing physics of all kinds.

Cons Explanation:

Story - It's ♥♥♥♥. If you're looking for a good story, go play a game that's advertised as one. Story in this one is convoluted and typical Metal Gear stories, at least for me. The two starting missions are ♥♥♥♥ and give you zero control over your character. Sure, Big Boss is weak and slow. Ishmael is not. He kind of just let's you crawl along, following him, and never helps you up. (Oooh, story reason for this, seen from a mile away).
Audio - There is so much audio clutter. Every time you scan an enemy with your binoculars, some female voice says some random thing about 'Scan complete'. This happens every time, and you will be scanning them every time. There is no option to change this, which is a theme with the audio. Additionally, running makes you hear the wind whistling past you, which gets old fast. The general audio quality is awful. There are no separate volume controls for dialogue, sound effects, or music. It's like it was designed to constantly deliver excessive information with no regard for the player. The sound of Sahelanthropus walking isn't synced with it actually walking. The iDroid (your phone, basically) overlaps with mission voiceovers and radio chatter, which makes it messy and illegible(?). Not sure if that's the right word. Speaking of which, 90% of the voice acting is garbage outside of story missions.
If you couldn't tell, I hate the audio in this game. It's my biggest issue with it. That, and Quiet whistling. Just shut up.
Tedium - After almost every major early-game story mission, there's an unavoidable section where some idiot speaks to you in a monotone about some cool new trinket you got. It's unskippable. It encourages real-life downtime. Then, if that wasn't bad enough, before each mission actually starts you get to equip your items. That's fine. After clicking 'commence mission', you have to sit through about two minutes of waiting for your helicopter to arrive at its destination before finally letting you start. Right after that, in the early game, you realise you have no car and are a kilometer from your destination. You then cannot find a car for the rest of that mission, and if you do, you cannot keep it with you because your funny extraction device isn't upgraded enough. When you try to upgrade it, you can't, because your R&D team isn't upgraded enough. You find some people to join it and extract them, but you run out of your extremely limited early game supply of them and have to wait until your current mission is completed before getting more. It's just unnecessary tedium that encourages real-world downtime just for the sake of you playing the game a bit longer. The iDroid menus stall, the helicopter rides stall (there's one at the end too, if you choose to extract that way), everything stalls. Why? To 'pace you' or something. It's just tedium. Even restarting the mission just restarts the helicopter ride, too.
That covers the 'tiresome development' part, too.
Visual clutter - there is so much. Every time you come across a dumpster, there's a marker telling you to pause and read a tooltip. It's not just dumpsters. It's also every placed object in the world. See a cassete tape? Tutorial. Take out a sniper rifle? Here's how to zoom in. Can't turn any of it off, and it all lasts for about ten seconds before it decays. Way too much. Even for the dumpsters and things like snipers spotting you, there's a tooltip. Even some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ on the radio comes and tells you about them every time. The game gives you an intel button, but shoves things in your face when you don't use it. That is not good game design. There is an overabundance of floating markers on every tiny little thing, and you can't turn it off (as far as I know). There's one over enemies' heads - that's fine. Over vehicles, yeah, okay. Over a mortar you're never going to use. Bit annoying. Over every single machine gun, every anti-air cannon, everything. That gets tiring fast. Environmental visual effects compete with the UI. Color saturation remains high. You want a full nohud playthrough? You still have stealth cues and objective markers that for some reason are under Gameplay, not Display. Still seeing button prompts? Deal with it.


I would recommend playing this game with the following mods:
Infinite Heaven and all of its subsidiaries
Audio Redux

If you want to question my amount of hours compared with my feelings about this game:
- I use SnakeBite Mod Manager, which seems to not count my hours in Steam. I would estimate I have about 120 or so hours in the game.
- Achievements don't seem to pop.

Finally:
- I do like this game's core gameplay, but it hurts my ears and doesn't respect my time, and therefore isn't worth full price in my opinion.
- I'm not reviewing FOB missions because I don't know it well enough to give a fair judgement.
- I do not natively speak English, and am sorry for any errors. Aue pai. He tangi mo taua mea.

Thank you for reading!