The game play is more than just blowing things up. This game can be quite hard. Too much destruction can potentially kill your bounty and deny you full payment. Accidentally kill civilians and you lose cash to the agency for public image "damage control". The Norks aren't such pushovers too. Their RPG troopers inflict incredibly annoying splash damage. Bunkers continuously spawn troops or TANKS and must be taken out by a well placed air strike or enough crates of C4. Vehicles can instantly kill you by running you over and if you're careless with your ordnance, as our pal Mattias often is, you'd be vaporized in an instant. If you die, you respawn in an AN medic camp but you're money will be deducted and that's money you could have spent on shelling that small village! What a waste.
The game is fairly linear; capture every ace until you get to Song. The faction missions are well done and actually have an overarching story that explodes in the climax of the fourth act. The Chinese are enemies with the South Koreans and you're actions drive them to the brink. None of the missions feel too repetitive. There's a mission I must mention where the Mafia needs you to collect small valuable things from several people quickly so they give you a super fast, ruby red, extra delicate sports car that must be made of magnetic material since rockets seem to be drawn to it. Finish the mission with the car in one piece for an extra bonus!
Aside from missions, you could go free roaming and collect regular bounties for cash and intel. You could do challenges or collect several rare items scattered across the map to unlock new stuff in the Mafia website. You could just dick around and destroy every North Korean unit you see and you'd still get paid for it.
Combat is just fun. The best part about it is hijacking enemy vehicles such as jeeps, tanks, helicopter gunships... You can even turn them in at the Mafia garage and earn even more money! There's nothing quite like running from cover to cover, shooting, throwing grenades and calling down air strikes on wave upon wave of never ending enemies who will not stop coming until every last building is reduced to craters visible from space.
Interestingly, the game even has a very basic stealth system in it. You can use faction vehicles to sneak in faction restricted areas. It is possible to sneak around and use your rifle to pick off key targets and use satellite targeted bombs to destroy important buildings from far away. Don't expect a pure stealth run to be possible. Maybe "stealth" is the wrong word. "Tactical" seems more like it.
To avoid staleness, the ace missions take place in their own special stages as mentioned. After every act, the violence in the map escalates and the work you've done for factions start to show. After the second act, we move to a new map further north that's even chaotic. Its smart to do this.
No complaints for the voice acting. Its good. The musical score is very good too. Each faction has a leitmotif going on and the music goes well with the frantic action. The graphics are excellent for its time. Its nice that the game can handle all the explosions, gunfire and carnage in a large map with little to no lag.
The only bad things about this game is that you can't swim. Aquatic shenanigans would add to this game but its not really necessary. The trees are indestructible for some reason. You cant even run over it with your tank. That sticks out like a sore thumb.What other bad thing can I possibly mention about this awesome game? Well there's a bug where the shotgun doesn't make a sound when fired. That's about it. Oh yeah, it spawned a terrible sequel but that's not this games fault now is it?
I just might hook up my old PS2 for this.
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