You play as special operative Captain Martin Walker of the United States Army who gets lost in Dubai during a catastrophic sandstorm and has to shoot his way out. The gameplay is a third-person cover-based shooting gallery with regenerating health. If you’ve played this kind of game before, you will know what to expect and if you’re like me you will be bored to tears. The story is an incoherent mess with a real cop-out of an ending. In keeping with a trend that seems quaint in the present day, but was all the rage in the West just a decade ago you are presented with highly contrived moral dilemmas (and false dilemmas) that the writers tought would blow minds. At one point you are coerced into choosing to execute either a man who stole water or a man who killed a family of five. The choice is obvious, isn’t it? And if that’s not stupid enough, it's revealed in a twist ending (that I predicted halfway through) that Walker partially hallucinated the whole thing.
What I find so objectionable is the fact that it's a typical American shooter with the pretense of challenging how we play typical American shooters by presenting a morally confused message about war in a typically American fashion. Don't waste your time trying to understand the plot or interpret its arcane themes. It doesn't make sense and it's not supposed to make sense. It's a work of fiction that says more about the culture and historical context that produced it than anything else.
At no point was I led to question any assumptions, recalibrate my worldview, or reconsider any of my life choices other than my choice to play this game which might be the worst I've ever played. Strong performances could have at least salvaged the story's emotional core considering its topical depiction of savage violence in a Middle-Eastern theater of war, but the acting fails to rise above mediocrity even by video game standards. To add insult to injury, I encountered an unavoidable crash when loading chapter 13 on PC and had to finish watching on youtube. Looking on the bright side, this was a relief considering how bored I was by that point. It does, however, have nice looking environments.
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