Shanghai collapses into a city-wide assault by a messianic villain targeting everyone involved in the setup, and two contractors spend a single escalating day fighting through the wreckage. The tone is explosive action-movie pastiche with comic-strip cutscenes and buddy banter, and the spectacle is the reason to play: skyscrapers levelled around the player, an eighty-three-floor descent, and a crane drop that ranks among the generation’s best pure set-pieces. The zoo chapter’s B-movie monologues epitomise the register, worst-zoo-ever villainy delivered with total sincerity.
The co-op toolkit is the game’s identity, and it works even with an AI partner. Aggro management, mock surrenders with tie-up-or-execute calls, synchronized sniper shots, back-to-back slow-motion set pieces, partner shields and a full order system (regroup, advance, hold, passive, aggressive) make every fight a systems playground; no other cover shooter makes co-op choreography its entire grammar this thoroughly. The back-to-back sequence in particular is a signature nobody else copied, and it lands every time it appears.
Weapon customisation is genuinely deep. Parts mix across guns (muzzles, barrels, magazines, skins, diamond-encrusted grenades), the economy is fed by saved civilians and bound hostages, and the tinkering menu invites hours of experimentation. The disappointment arrives in the stats: the starting AK outperforms most purchases, some trade-offs are opaque (a magazine attachment that seems to lower damage), and the suite is more toy than system. Customisation of the protagonists’ masks and gear adds personality the bland characterisation lacks.
Cover controls actively fight the player. Pressing stick-plus-button vaults instead of sticking, repeatedly at the worst moments, and the ambiguity between vault and cover never becomes legible across the whole campaign. Enemy spawning veers from fun to cheap: endless reinforcements, shotgun heavies spawning directly behind the player, and aimless circling AI that undermines the aggro system’s cleverness. Framerate dips in dense crowd scenes, and lengthy loading screens are made stranger by unexplained revolving-door zones near the finale.
The morality system is illusionary. Choices pepper the story, but sparing a character gets him killed anyway, the hospital chapter goes badly whichever way it is played, and the finale’s four-button coin-flip resolves nothing. Saved civilians supposedly return as allies, yet the outcome never bends toward the player’s decisions; the story asks for investment while quietly guaranteeing the same destination. The ending deflates the bombast entirely: a comic-strip non-ending after the biggest set-pieces, perfunctory where the campaign deserved a payoff.
Pacing stumbles alongside the narrative. The zoo chapter earns its villain monologues, but lengthy loading screens separate too many segments, and the endgame spikes with shotgun-heavy ambushes and wave spawns that cheapen what the co-op systems spent hours building. Hidden cats reward thoroughness (both findable with patience), and the collectible layer stays unobtrusive even when the radio logs go unlistened.
Friction completes the era-typical picture. Radio logs and ambient chatter ship without subtitles, a shame for players who would otherwise listen, and the AI partner reliability wobbles: going down fast, refusing cover when hurt, and an allied character who dies by charging enemies headlong with no command option to prevent it. Hidden cats (both findable) and radio logs (abandonable) round out the collectibles.
Overall, this is a bombastic buddy-shooter that is still a great time on pure systems, as long as expectations for the story or the morality system stay grounded: the co-op grammar, the Shanghai spectacle and the customisation toy box carry it past its cover ambiguity, spawn cheese and deflated ending. The systems remain the series’ best argument, and its abandonment afterwards remains the genre’s loss.
