Some of the best you can find in terms of first person shooters. Great map variety, great guns, lots of enemy types and some of the best boss fights in FPS games. The only bad thing is the writing if you don't like dumb humor. Because all the humanoids in this game take turns on who gets the one braincell in the universe. But you can very easily skip all of the cutscenes.

It also has actually fun vehicle segments that aren't too prevalent, keeping them interesting when they appear. There's a lot of fun gimmicks thrown in the mix for levels generally too. Like some levels where you are forced to speedrun them and a "freezing" mechanic where you need to move in and out of shelter.

I never understood why this game is considered the worst in the series. If I were to guess, it's how much gameplay variety it has and the fact it's long. That and how stylistically different it is from every other Sam game.

Does open world better than many current open world games. It's all a quest to gather information from people, piece it together and eventually reach the end of the game.

The morality system is great and I enjoyed the experience of making my maps for the overworld by hand. Unlike the dungeons, I can quickly draw it and have more room for error in interpretation.

However, it has the WORST battle system I have ever seen. It's also incredibly slow and you need to grind a fair bit. I'd honestly recommend this to anyone interested in RPG history and a unique experience to open world exploration. But don't force yourself past the point it stops being fun.

Great fun when I played, but the more time passes, the less and less I like the game. It's a visual novel so, obviously, I care about writing most. It's not great. The honeymoon phase being over fully now, the game not having a real story, just a lot of individual stories that mostly end up being unfinished makes me feel like they thought about things happening and were content with superficiality. Stuff happening in the world is just material for characters to talk about. The game is too short and they toss too much under the rug. I like most characters, but I didn't feel most of them were developed satisfyingly enough.

Most of the sexual themed jokes (which are plenty) feel like they're made by a teenager boy who found out lesbians are a thing. And when it's not between women, it's not much better. The writing when it involves anything sexual is very immature 9 times out of 10.

All in all, to end with, it's style over substance. I loved that style when I played, but it has worn out for me and the substance isn't anything special. Feels like it's considered so well written because people who played this probably didn't play any other visual novels.