welcome, agent. you are america's most clandestine weapon, a secret kept even from the president because obama can't know all the crazy earth shattering work you're doing like bugging terrorist organizations or punching brown people. your mission is simple: shoot off a bunch of marvel movie one liners and spend hours crawling around in the same middle eastern environments every crouch high wall shooter was just obsessed with at the time. what, you thought a game about being a secret agent would be all tuxedos and dangling from the ceiling? well, if it is, none of that certainly happens in the game's first four hours (and believe me, there's a lot more sand world to go on my end). don't fret, though, because you want that james bond smooth talking, yeah? well there's definitely conversations--you get vague dialogue options set on a quick timer that make people like or dislike you based on your schizoid responses (if you play anything like me). you should have a good grasp of this by the way because you sit through, like, a twenty minute long lecture given by your boss who's concerned you haven't yet been briefed on what "talking" is.

well okay, so it's the desert. but is it fun to play? well, if you play stealth you get to face a threat that back and forth wavers between intellectually disabled and eagle eye replacement surgery, and any time you die (or get caught and don't want to spoil the ghost run), you have to load an arbitrary checkpoint (which happens before new dialogue, so you'll hear it every. single. time). and you'll get caught for an amazing amount of reasons--you'll use the cover system to hide behind a wall only for the wall to not actually fully shield you so you get spotted away. you'll walk on sand outside and a bad guy on the other side of an iron door will panic that the base is under attack. and sometimes the game will just decide they get to spawn in full alert, those bird eyes scanning right through walls with infrared.

well, what if you just roll with getting caught? yeah, ethan hunt's definitely killed a few, so you can too. and i say go for it and time how long before you realize you're just now playing a straightforward third person military shooter, 100% completely unchallenging. and let's run back to stealth for the topic of unchallenging because, again, that ai is just insanely stupid most of the time when they're not on alert. this is no doubt an accommodation for the game using a checkpoint system, given that really REALLY tough stealth would just be a nightmare with that. but this is a horrible trade off, what the hell? why not the opposite--smart ai and a manual save system? not like we don't have games like deus ex or thief out a decade earlier helping lay that sort of framework.

i like that the game's an rpg and has different areas to allot skill points and upgrade, even though most of the upgrades feel really, really useless to a morally acting agent. i like that the game has conversations, even though the commitment to having conversations realistically flow comes at the cost of saying really stupid, shitty things you never would've intended had you known what you're psycho of a character was actually going to say. i like... two of the hacking minigames, i guess. lockpicking one is total ass, but the other two are alright. i know--i'm scraping the bottom here trying to find anything positive to say, because it's clear that there are some interesting aspects to the game otherwise i wouldn't have bothered playing past the agonizingly boring first twenty minutes, but here we are.

if there is a better game hidden further in, i am very sorry they don't lead with it, and i am very sorry they hedge their bets on another fucking afghan sand-em-up aesthetic. apparently this game isn't even offered for sale on steam anymore, and you know what? consider sega doing you a favor.