I haven't beaten it, and I might come back to it, but 11 hours in and it just feels like a deliberately taxing experience, putting annoyance over both challenge and entertainment. The art style is kinda eh and makes everything blend together, and most of the bosses are super forgetable (tree of men is kinda cool in all fairness). Hitboxes and telegraphs are horrifically underdeveloped at times with many encounters feeling like dicerolls in a game that shouldn't be based on luck. It's a shame because it is an ambitious game with some solid core mechanics, I just don't think it was designed with fun in mind. I may come back to give this another chance.

The divide in quality between nearly all of the rest of the game and this is astronomical. I took off a point for horsefuck valley, but this DLC is dominated by the best area and two best bosses in the game. It looks gorgeous, every enemy is designed to be a genuine challenge while rarely annoying, the sprawling main level is one of the best designed in the series, and this is overall just some excellent content capped off with a phenomenal final battle. My only critique of the main campaign is that this is in Dark Souls II.

Sacrificing it's predessessor's "realistic but epic" feel in return for a totally ridiculous plot was an excellent decision, at least in my opinion. The campaign improves on every aspect, the characters are more memorable, the levels more interestingly designed, the enemies less annoying while not being a total cakewalk. The combat is far more agile and exciting, the guns are overall much more consistently fun to experiment with, and while this is kinda just a "dumb military shooter" it strips the foundations that its predessesor laid to radically improve the formula.

"No Russian" is polarising for good reason, you feel awful during this level regardless of whether you pull the trigger, its a massive contrast with the goofy b-movie tone of the rest of the game but its an excellent exploration of Makarov's character. Its not the peak of videogame storytelling but it gets the job done. Meanwhile "Cliffhanger" or "The Only Easy Way..." feel straight out of a 60s Bond movie, they're fun, fast and while not shy from being corny help sell the over the top world of MW2. The missions in America are definitely the weakest, but they serve their purpose, and felt much less like accidental glorification than the middle east missions in MW1.

Overall this delivers as a genuinely fun, varied and creative military shooter, and while I'm very aware of its flaws I can look past them to acknowlege this is just a damn good time. Even if its only about 4-5 hours long.

This is a really cute and charming game. Its also a frustrating and tedious mess. For every hour of loveable charm this game offers there is another of monotony, with the odd helping of bullshit permeating it. I’d say the charm is worth the frustration, but this is as much a test of patience as skill. I played it on easy mode and I'd still consider it one of the more challenging games I've played. Throughout most of the game one on one enemy encounters feel like a coin toss more than a fair fight. The average fight goes like this:
Does my bullet miss? Ok what move are they doing? Right I'm dead.
Everything kills you quickly in this game, but thankfully virtually everything can be killed in a matter of seconds. This is a great way of making the gameworld feel dangerous while at the same time realistic. You really feel like every enemy has set stats and inventory uses like yourself, which further immerses the player in Brigand’s lo-fi, old school aesthetic.
If unpredictable and arguably unfair combat will stop you from playing this, there’s no shame. It’s hard to recommend this, especially considering that I had to message the developer to fix bugs during my playthrough. That said there’s a lot of freedom of choice considering the small ensemble of cast members and factions, a lot of different builds to play around with, the loveable characters one dimensional to the point of parody, the dated visuals cohesive in their incohesiveness. And the soundtrack is full of songs straight out of Machinimas from the early 2010s. Fans of Deus Ex, System Shock, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the early Fallout titles will find something to love here.
If you’re reading this Brian, thanks you, this is a game I won’t soon forget.

This epytomises everything great and terrible about mid 90s FPS's. Downright confusing level design means that, without a walkthrough, you'll be hard pressed to work out how to go from A to B for a lot of this game. Thanks to the design philospohy of each level being a hub world with interconnected levels, it can be very daunting upon first picking this up to guage what you're doing.

That said, there's a phenomenal game in here. I only played as the cleric, and will hopefully try out the other classes another time, but my experience gave me some of the best shooting of the 90s, with great weapons, fun enemies (minus those centaurs) and a gorgeous art style. This is likely the greatest the un-modded Doom engine could look, with fog and particle effects creating a great sense of atmosphere, and the animations and sprites look fantastic. Overall, if you're willing to put up with convoluted level design I'd very much reccomend this to fans of boomer shooters.