A bleak cyberpunk 2065 of mega-cities, superstorms and a new cold war, told through the deterioration of a soldier’s neural implant. A covert experimentation project has birthed a rogue AI that infects the DNI implants linking soldiers into a networked consciousness, and the conspiracy-mystery structure that follows is the most narratively experimental the series has attempted: an unreliable-narrator campaign filtered through failing hardware, complete with in-fiction tutorials, dream sequences and a villain who is an intelligence rather than a person. No other entry blurs simulation and reality this far, and the intrigue sustains itself right through to an identity twist that recontextualises everything before it. Accepting ambiguity where the mechanics don’t fully cohere is part of the deal, and worth it.
The reality-bending missions are the story’s high points. A dream sequence set in a 1940s battlefield, a zombie nightmare unfolding inside a dying mind during an interface sequence, and a finale that fully abandons the grounding of its own genre make the campaign memorable in ways the series rarely attempts. The hub-based mission select with loadouts, fabrication kits and weapon and ability upgrades gives the seven-hour structure variety, spanning a hostage-rescue prologue, a Singapore quarantine zone arc, Cairo’s war-torn districts and the surreal finale, and the game looks impressively sharp for its age.
The reputation that precedes this campaign undersells and misrepresents it. A scene explained away as a train collision was charming exactly once, then repeated across the opening simulations until the joke curdled into annoyance, and it became the game’s shorthand in the wider culture despite everything else on offer. The prologue’s body-horror dismemberment sets a tonal seriousness the meme never mentions. Anyone arriving expecting a dumb game, based on that single scene, finds a conspiracy thriller instead.
The cyber ability system is the most fun the series’ power sets have ever offered. Hacking, Fireflies nanobots that open enemies up for clean kills, Emulation, EMP palm strikes: the wheel turns experimentation into a default playstyle rather than a gimmick, and it papers over most of the campaign’s other rough edges. Tactical mode vision, highlighting enemies and grenade blast zones through walls, sits alongside it as a cheat-code-level aid that makes crowded firefights legible. Together they define the playthrough, and the boots-on-the-ground shooting underneath remains reliably punchy.
Friction accumulates in the systems around the shooting. Enemy weapon pickups are disabled entirely, stripping out a series staple and making loadouts feel static, and the secondary slot is locked to pistols, eliminating the two-primary flexibility the sandbox used to reward. Escalating fabricated weapons are often strictly worse than starting gear, with damage and range losing to fire rate on paper and in practice, making progression feel pointless. Wall-running works in the tutorial and then inconsistently at best, refusing to activate when the geometry demands it, and climbing and vaulting misbehave in the Lotus Towers mission.
The final Zurich mission is the campaign’s lowest point. Enemy spawning runs effectively endless, waves arriving without rhyme or reason in a way that feels genuinely broken rather than deliberately hard, and the mission’s design appears not to have been thought through at all. A forced sniper section and armoured tank fights demand tediously specific counter-weapons, sending players hunting for RPGs they never picked, and companion AI occasionally fails to react to enemies standing directly beside them. Each issue is survivable; stacked into the last hour, they test patience hard.
Overall, this is a far smarter, stranger and more enjoyable campaign than its meme reputation suggests: the cyber ability kit and tactical vision carry the combat, the reality-bending story rewards theorising, and the identity twist redeems even the broken final mission. Disabled weapon pickups, the pistol-locked secondary, finicky wall-running and endless Zurich spawning are real flaws, but none of them fatal. The intrigue is the point, and it delivers.
