Probably the first game to make you feel like your'e in an actual fucking war? It blows the pants off of Spielberg's stiff, stodgy MEDAL OF HONOR by streamlining everything, focusing on dropping you in the middle of an honest-to-God squad of soldiers out in the SHIT, and cranking up the volume. Haven't had my heart pounding in earnest from an FPS in quite a while, but there were moments where I was behind some miniscule piece of cover, absolutely surrounded by enemy gunfire, and just stunned, overwhelmed, frozen in indecision about which way to even start shooting to try to save myself and the mission. It is genuinely harrowing at times.

The gameplay is extremely simple (you get a very funny tooltip in the first level of the game if you walk up to any door, flatly outlining exactly what kind of game this is), and there is a lot of smoke-and-mirrors stuff happening to make it seem like things aren't as completely on-rails they are. This is a familiar formula now, but for a PC shooter in 2003, nothing felt as cinematic and urgent as this. The only aspects that even feel video game-like at all are the health pickups (quickly done away with in the next ones, right?) and a couple missions where you're doing totally unrealistic solo commando shit - and these are easily the low points of the game. The rest of it is loud, immersive, and crazy successful at making you feel like you're playing Saving Private Ryan or whatever - ironic given that it's basically a direct response from Infinity Ward to the big man Steve S. himself.

It seems like a lot of effort and budget went into this. It looks great, has lots of original design and lore, a name voice actor for the MC (a very not good Henry Rollins), a full, working second gameplay type (space flight/combat), a long campaign. But it's all in service of this CRUSHINGLY boring and vanilla sci-fi FPS experience. Dull and unsatisfying with nothing interesting at all going on in the story or the ships or the aliens or the guns or the levels, to the point where - even though there's nothing wrong with it on a technical level - I don't think you could pay me to play through the full fifteen hours(!!!!!!) it apparently runs for. Absolutely brutal snoozer.