i always found the talk around its depiction of violence the most boring aspect of the game. It isn't bad per se, but with games like this or Spec Ops: The Line, i always found the setting (here, the 80s far remove from simple aestheticism, with the underlaying pressence of the Cold War and class dynamics as contrast of both protagonits) and the way in which we become part average videogame vessel and part conspiranoid interpreter of the game itself what attracts me the most.
It's all about how Jacket and Biker engage with their own violent travesy, where one tries to find a way to reconnect with the world only to realize that he's so far remove from the picture that he leaves it away in the air, and the other subdues to tentation of everything having a literal explanation. In that case, Jacket is reborn in Biker and, with that, the conclusion of both killing each other makes both journeys equally valid and meaningless. It recognizes us as active participants and spectators of the fiction at play, but it also understands how, to give meaning, we have to erase the most literalize aspects of it and perceive it as the fully realize metaphor that they are as individuals in the big picture.
Does the abstraction clash with the secret ending literalizing everything? Sure. But i think that the idea that's even optional is a step towards the overall message.
It was a "revenge story" with none of the moralist bullshit, born out of an inherent nationalistic perspective (killing russians, the villians plan being basic world domination stuff) and one in which we are small compared to the big landscape in which it was developed, with no other choice than to accept it and, no matter how many time we either try to complacent to the status quo or trying to change it (as Biker, we can kill all the people in the Phone company as we once seen as Jacket and mantain the "coherence" of the fiction, or leave them alive with zero repercution), it will find a way to keep going forward and accomodate us.