The game's controls get the job done, despite the aforementioned aiming difficulties. The more glaring issue is when the game asks you to drive a vehicle, which is when the controls fall apart. Whether a hovercraft or a tank, the vehicles handle as poorly as any game you have played before. The clunky, awkward movement of the tank simply does not make its destructive cannon worth using. Thankfully, the tank is not the only opportunity to cause large explosions. Nearly every level seems littered with explosive barrels, which turn your crosshairs yellow when highlighted. Conveniently, most enemies seem to think of the barrels as cover, rather than the dangerous firebombs they are.
The game makes odd distinctions between what is unlimited and what needs replenishing from the occasional storage crate. While your bullets and health packs are in never-ending supply, the same is not true of anything explosive. While this limits the use of Lang's heavy artillery rocket launcher and grenade launcher, odds are you will care less about the grenades. The game does not offer an aiming mechanism for throwing them, and tapping the button throws it just as far as if you hold it. The combination of your unsure hand throwing the grenades and the constant appearance of explosive barrels makes for some unnecessarily tense moments.
On the hardest setting, the game starts unsettlingly simple, with frequent checkpoints and enemies coming in twos and threes. It helps make the previously mentioned A.I. issues tolerable, and make it feel as though your globetrotting 'kill 'em all' missions will be over in one sitting. While there are only ten missions to blast through, once your choice in what mission to complete next is over, so is the game's easy-going difficulty. Suddenly, enemies start showing up in handfuls, from all directions, checkpoints come long after you think they reasonably should, and you become stuck replaying the same section of a level for an hour or longer. For all else the game gets wrong, its slowly ramped up difficulty is spot-on, leaving you with a well-earned feel of accomplishment once you finally beat the game. Late in the game, you will be cursing the developers for the lack of a mid-level 'save' option.
The game's audio and graphics feel average at best. Darkness shrouds most of the game's levels, leading you to either stumble around levels in the night or turn on your night-vision goggles to see everything in obnoxious green tint. Levels in the daytime look adequate, but are not anything close what the 360 is capable of. As for the audio, the music is the kind of stock, tense military shooter fodder you expect, and the voice-over work is definitely not what you expect, or want.
There is a world of difference between cursing to sound cool and actually sounding cool doing it. Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith get it. So did last year's gritty shooter Kane & Lynch. This game does not. Oftentimes, the characters come across as if fourth-graders trying to throw in swear words they overheard, but do not quite have a handle on how to use. When Lang is called over to heal a downed Graves, one of a few predetermined phrases you will hear is, "I ain't doin' this myself, sh*t yo ass". How exactly one 'sh*ts' their ass is something that will at least keep your mind occupied, so you do not have to think too deeply about the game's story. Lang also seems to have an alarming, yet hilarious, case of reverse racism. Everyone you come across, be it other US soldiers, Russians, and even Venezuelans are 'rednecks'. Maybe Lang is a fourth-grader, after all.
