This game feels like the closest thing you will ever find to an amalgamation of Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. You have the action shootouts, non lethal gameplay, and setpieces of MGS and the shadows based stealth, climbing, guard grabbing and gadgets of the Splinter Cell series. This game would funnily enough introduce the ability to takeout enemies from cover a decade before Blacklist would implement it all though unlike Blacklist and Splinter Cell in general, you have no ability to shootout lights and shadows are basically just cover points. An improvement over the MGS series this game has is that the non lethal tranq has limited ammo and finding pickups is hard to come by which means that if you want to actively take out enemies in a level without running out of tranq darts fast, you are going to have to take out enemies up close and personally, which is the way I like it. The music is also pretty good even if it remixes the MI theme a little too much but they are still well made. The game also has a super action packed setpiece driven finale that is devoid of a lot of stealth gameplay much like your average MGS game. However despite how interesting I find this game for being this weird amalgamation what prevents me from fully reccomending it and me calling it a hidden gem is the buggy nature of the game.
Examples being the AI notices you too fast, enemies can sometimes just spawn in, and getting alerted can lack any kind of consisteny, that and while the ability to cancel out an alert by scanning an alarm is cool, it's a feature that is very buggy. You can keep scanning alarms and the alarm will still activate which caused me to restart a section.
Another issue I have is that the controls can feel weird, and the takedowns can be very glitchy, which is why I stopped using them and grabbed enemies and took them out instead since grabbing is not contextual or at least is more consistently reliable. And the setpieces can be a nightmare at times, the ones where they emulate the films where Ethan is hanging on with a rope and hacking into computers while avoiding lasers being a low point. And the late game skydiving sections are also really imprecise and awkward to control.
The shootouts are while being nothing too special with guns having okay feedback and having decent accuracy and due to this, they aren't too frustrating but at the same time, the hit detection isn't that great with the enemies taking multiple headshots when the crosshair in on their head and the AI being really dumb where they just stand around or just move on occasion with no sense of tactics or self preservation, but once again, I didn't mind this too much since I would rather have dumb but workable AI than dumb AI with no tactics to exploit but it goes to show the unpolished nature of the game.
They story is your typical spy movie and Mission Impossible fare, they did a decent enough job adapting what you find in an MI movie narrative into a game, you have Ethan's teammates who is basically just his servants and nothing more, and the banter with the teammates are solid enough all though it feels like there was only 3-4 voice actors who were in this game. The villains are the kind you'd find in the genre. Speaking of voice acting, the idea of Steve Blum playing Ethan Hunt was rather amusing and I might prefer this to having a possibly bored Tom Cruise. He does a good job with the material he's given.
This game is weird in that, while it is generally playable and can be enjoyable, it feels like more polish could've elevated it a good deal. Still, I'd say the game is worth checking out as a stealth game fan and as a Mission Impossible fan.
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