Kind of a mixed bag on this one. I really enjoyed the single player campaign of this game. That alone is almost enough to tell you to go ahead and buy this game. Multiplayer is a whole different story. I am baffled as to why they decided to make this game a third person shooter. After playing it for roughly 50 hours I can honestly say I would have enjoyed the game more had it been a first person shooter. To be fair, I have to admit I am not a fan of third person shooters. Gears of War was not my bag. I like the single player side of GoW, but passed on the MP.

There were some really annoying things about multiplayer that eventually led me to shelve it and stop playing. Here’s the hit list.

Load times. For the love of all things holy are the load times ridiculous in this game. First for some baffling reason there are two start screens. What I mean is you are presented with a “Press Start button” screen and after you do this another screen appears that asks you to “Press the Start Button”. What’s the purpose of this? No earthly idea.

By far my favorite though is when you join an MP game you get a loading screen. Ok that’s to be expected, happens in all games. After the match loads you appear in the game lobby and a waiting timer slowly ticks down. I assume this is syncing players and also to be expected. But then 9 times out of 10, yep you guessed it, more loading. The aggravating thing is that you see other players on your team fanning out over the map while you are stuck loading. Don’t even think about changing your character class unless you want to endure more loading.

Suffice to say, the loading is beyond ridiculous.

Kill cams are also frustrating. They almost never show what you saw in the last seconds before your character dies. I have heard all manner of explanation for this and I don’t care. If they are that irritating and don’t show what you personally witnessed they make the game all the poorer for it.

Not a fan of the unlock system. You have to choose to unlock one of two things at certain points in your progression. I assume this is some ploy at trying to get you to level up yet another character and keep you playing longer. If that’s the case then the dev’s should have made the game less irritating to play. I will not be leveling another MP character in the same class.

This game also employs the player hosting model. Really don’t like that. It’s just a low ball attempt by Ubisoft to save money by not having to host games on dedicated servers. More than that, you have to put up with the dreaded “Host Migration” screens when the host leaves the match. Even more irritating if you are playing the MP mode Decoy and your team has managed to capture two or three objectives, they reset when the player host leaves. Let this happen a few times and let me know how you feel. There are also times where the match just ends and you get the “connection lost” screen. I think this is also related to the player hosting model but also happens when the Ubisoft servers go down.

I could go on and tell you about several other annoyances but let’s just end this with multiplayer being a wash and move on.

One last thing I want to mention before I sign off, playing the single player missions with a friend was also lots of fun. High marks there.

To sum up, single player was pretty enjoyable but multiplayer misses the mark. In hind sight I would have waited to purchase this game after it dropped in price. You make your own call.