I had put off playing this for the longest time because I figured it was just another generic shooter, but it's anything but. Unique level design and mechanics, cool weapons, fantastic art design that holds up even now, and a gripping story with believable writing and characters. It took almost no time at all to become one of my favorite shooters, and the fate its sequel suffered might be the biggest tragedy in video game history since the crash of 1983. I know I sound like a broken record but I don't care, I'll break and break and break until I'm microscopic particles of decomposed vinyl: Fuck Bethesda.

Fallout came out over a year earlier and does almost everything better, the main exception being how companions are handled. While I do find this game's combat more fluid than Fallout's, the encounter design is, more often than not, fucking abominable and ends up making the combat as a whole feel worse as a result. This would be a friendship ruiner if it were an actual D&D campaign, maybe even a cause for justifiable homicide. I'll give it props for its cultural impact and for cementing BioWare's place in video games, but that's about it.

This game has really clear production value with how great it looks and the film's cast delivering excellent performances. Unfortunately, outside of that it's kinda just...there. The gameplay is an adequate mix of platformers, brawlers and stealth games (namely Splinter Cell) of the time with plenty of cool, proto-Arkham ideas, but they're never really utilized in any interesting ways. The level design is very linear, almost formulaic after a certain point, but never offensive. The combat is pretty loose, with a camera that's too zoomed in that makes fighting multiple enemies really difficult. You don't have any real combos and your attacks get blocked all the fucking time, and the only way to break an enemy's defense is a context sensitive action that takes a little too long to charge up (if it even decides to allow you to do it) and can easily get canceled by another enemy. Despite all that, I never found myself that frustrated with it. Then again, I never really felt many emotions playing the game in general. Like I said, it's just kinda there.