Ah yes, The Original Cover Shooter, the one that kickstarted it all. It's really interesting to play this myself, as to me, this felt closer to on-rail shooters like Time Crisis instead of modern cover shooters. There's a certain rhythm to its gameplay: finding cover, locking on to enemies, popping up from cover and gunning them down when it's safe to do so, and so on. This sounds like a typical cover shooter, but the way this game controls has that same kind of step-by-step process like how one would play a Time Crisis cabinet. Stomping on the pedal to take cover, waiting for the red enemies to finish their shot, and so on. This strategic routine is cemented by the fact that you don't just do things instantly, there's a short period before you actually finish your animations, which makes the game more about planning ahead rather than pure reflexes. It definitely takes a while to fully familiarize with the controls, but once it clicks, it's actually pretty fun.

Sadly there's just other aspects of the game that does not hold up at all. The level design is just straight up annoying most of the times, it really feels like you're just mindlessly looking for enemies to kill, and all the other objectives you do are only meaningless obstacles that gets in the way of getting into the next "new" location. I put new in quotations because there's a lot of backtracking here, and this adds to that feeling of not being in sync with what the game wants you to do, because its usually not clear why you're backtracking, but its the only way to progress.

It's a bummer, because the gameplay itself is genuinely fun and interesting, and I find the early 3D era story cutscenes to be charming. I just don't want to go through these dumb-ass levels, man.