It’s hard to judge a game that does the fundamentals so well but everything else terribly. It doesn’t really work as a whole due to its different sections being very clearly separated, divided between stealth -which is how the levels are traversed- and action -the bossfights-, with stuff happening in between to give context, momentum and an excuse to keep going, plus some hit and miss gimmicks here and there to add variety. The stealth sections are surprisingly good, linear enough as to not get lost but open enough to have some room to explore and try different stuff, this reinforced by the quite forgiving save and checkpoint systems. During most of the game, the top-down camera makes traversing levels a bit of a chore, making you look not at what it shows you but at the radar on the corner that shows map layout, since it shows both the map layout and player and enemy positions in real time. To mitigate this and make it interesting, though, there’s certain parts where the radar doesn’t work, forcing you to approach situations in a more cautious way, using items like goggles, peeking around corners or having to pay more attention to enemy behaviours. Also a cool touch that hiding is not limited to staying out of enemy sight by staying behind walls or objects since you can crawl and hide under things, with the point of view changing accordingly from third-person with top-down perspective to first person, leading you to use sound as the primary sense instead of sight, since most of what you can see is at ground level.
And while all of this is great, the action sections, the bossfights, are a boring 3D Zelda copy at best and a silly Benny Hill chase sketch at worst. To tie it all together, setting the tone, the pacing and overall direction of the game, is the narrative and how it’s presented to us through radio conversations and cinematics. I honestly don’t mind what it is about, even with all the B movie tropes and shonen antagonists, but what makes it not work for me is the lack of trust in itself, its setting and ideas and, specially, the terrible writing. It’s kinda weird to see a war veteran in need of constant instructions even for the most basic things, how the cinematics exist mostly to very explicitly explain what’s going by everyone with more than a couple lines of dialog on or how poorly written the female characters are -some of the worst in videogames, I might say-. What remains, then, is a well presented package of a somewhat interesting experience that sadly gets lost in the sauce, with the high points, the climax of everything that you do, dragging the whole thing down.