Originally posted by: venkman
It's Call of Duty 2 with some energy weapons and a crappy hubworld.
The crappy hub world was part of the problem too. The same streets with infinite re-spawn is not what I consider content. Traveling (repeatedly) through the city became a chore, and just wasn't fun after a while.
Talking abut chores, the scavenger hunt for money/tomes/intel was also pretty tiresome, but necessary. Which leads to the next problem...
The money and tomes are necessary because they tried to tie in an RPG element into the game were you bought limited upgrades from the black market, but it was half-assed. If it had been a real RPG, I could've just shot the black market guy in the head, accepted the negative karma, and taken the upgrades from him. That's the point of the a merchant NPC in an RPG - either I do the 'right' thing and pay them, or I do the 'wrong' thing by killing them and/or stealing their wares. If the merchant is just there to give me upgrades in exchange for things I have to find throughout the game, why not just give me the damn upgrade when I find whatever it was that I was supposed to find?
On the plus side, I enjoyed most of the actual combat/missions. Basically, the parts where it was just an FPS were fun to me. It wasn't ground breaking, but it was fun and what I expected buying an id/Raven game. IMO, I think it would have been a better game overall had they just been honest and made it a linear FPS without the inclusion of weak RPG elements and a pretense to having an open world.