Arguably the best shooter ever made

I recently picked this game up because the laptop I had purchased for college was finally a computer powerful enough to run it. It is easily one of the best computer games I've ever played. The playing world is massive (you can literally walk to any mountain or monument you see in the distance) and there are multiple ways to accomplish a goal and/or solve a mission.

The basic plot is this: you are Jack Carver, who has accompanied a woman to a part of Micronesia for undisclosed reasons (she turns out to be a CIA agent), and before long she is kidnapped, and you are fighting for your life against an army of well-trained mercenaries. It's a fairly generic shooter plot, but it gets the point across and ties everything together well.

The enemy AI is unbelievably good. The soldiers work together to take you down (all the while dropping hilariously bad one-liners like "HOW DO YOU LIKE THOSE APPLES??", "RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES, MOFO!", "I'M GONNA TEAR YOU A NEW ONE!!"). The shootouts that result in this game are a blast: you really have to get good cover and strategize your fight. It's the first shooter I've played that makes me feel like I'm actually in an action movie.

The vehicles are one of the game's biggest highlights. If you want to move quicker downstream, you can snipe at occupants of the frequent patrol boats on the water and steal their ride. You can often obtain RVs and ATVs (and at one point in the game, a forklift for reasons unknown). These are a blast as you can drive right through the enemies firing at you. One thing I enjoy doing is driving full speed at an enemy and bailing out at the last second. Always good fun.

The game is also a great challenge. I just completed the game on the Medium setting and it was still almost impossible in places. Fighting the trigens (the small monkey-like creatures with claws) is a nightmare on any diffculty, as they can outrun and outJUMP you and kill you with, often, a single hit (I strongly suggest using the sniper rifle or a powerful machine gun other than the M4 on them at long distance before they really mess you up!)

In short, this is the best FPS I have ever played, and probably one of the best computer games ever made overall. Highly recommended.

(on a side note: not that it matters to me, but I'm personally surprised this game got a Mature rating...there is barely any blood at all, and none of it sticks on the floor. And when shot with a rocket launcher, people don't explode like normally in Mature-rated shooters. This game SHOULD have been rated TEEN).