Alice Gets Fragged

You are Rico Rodriguez, a US agent sent into the fictional Southeast Asian country of Panau, where a new non-US-friendly dictator has taken over and the previous US agent is nowhere to be found.  Your mission?  To find out what's really happening in Panau.

BANG!  KAPOW!  BOOM!  If you like these sounds, you'll probably like this game.  By "find out what's really happening", I meant, "blow up as much stuff as possible".  And there is plenty to blow up, with 369 locations to discover and explore.  This game is really all about the splodies.  Gas tanks, SAM sites, oil pipelines, generators, transformers, statues of the president, literally thousands of possible sabotages.  If you prefer live victims, the game offers tons of creative ways to reduce the size of the Panauan military, including hanging them from buildings and whipping them to death, dragging them behind vehicles, blowing them high into the air with rockets, pulling them down from towers so they fall to their deaths... all accompanied by satisfying screams.  There's also a lot of vehicular mayhem to be caused and you can do this in your vehicle of choice - motorcycles, cars, trucks, badass tanks, boats with rockets, helicopters with rockets, jets, airliners and even tractors and tuk-tuks.  Plus, the island is littered with temptingly shiny boxes which, once collected, allow you to upgrade your armour or black market items.  Some of them are simply cash; apparently the good people of Panau don't worry much about leaving boxes of $2500 on their back porches or in their fields.

There is a good mix of missions in the game - my favourite being the one where you get to fight hundred-year-old Japanese infantrymen.  Then there are driving missions, flying missions, assassination missions of all kinds, and of course plenty of missions involving satisfying explosions.

Rico is hailed as a saviour as he goes around destroying this idyllic little island nation's infrastructure, all in the name of regime change.  The storyline is silly, so silly that I have to think the developers meant it to be that way and, while far from brilliant, it's good for a few laughs.  For example, the last battle of the game takes place while riding flying nukes.  On the whole, the cutscenes are pretty skippable and the game doesn't force you to watch most of them.

This is really a pretty easy game once you get the hang of it and especially once you learn how to use the grappling hook and parachute to good effect.  Switching guns once you run out of ammo (which will happen a LOT) is vaguely annoying as the game doesn't do it automatically.  You will accumulate an enormous amount of money as you go through the game and so any time you get stuck you can use the black market to your advantage.  The game has four difficulty settings, allowing an appropriate level of challenge for almost anyone, and it autosaves all the time so you almost never have to go back and do things over again.  The one exception to this is during some missions where the checkpoints are spaced quite annoyingly far apart.  However, most of the faction missions are short (sometimes only "kill this one guy") and can be made even shorter by finishing off the area before you start the mission, thus eliminating most of the resistance you would have faced.  Quite a few of the races are easy as well (and btw, the checkpoints make a satisfying bang when you go through them...)

The game is as long as you want it to be.  I finished off all the agency missions, thus beating the game, in about fifteen hours with 26% completion, but you can take your time between or after those missions and go around the island exploring all 369 (the game says 368, but somehow I ended up with 369/368) locations.  I've put in 122 hours on my primary game (being temporarily unemployed has its benefits!) and am at 96% completion.  As the game autosaves all the time, and as you can roam around pretty freely in this game, there's really no requirement to finish a certain set of tasks all at once.  You can pick it up and put it down whenever you like and just do whatever you have time for.

Rico has some good one-liners ("Try to transport fuel now, you pipeline jerks!" and "Someone not dancing to Uncle Sam's tune?") and is generally a likeable (and ruggedly sexy!) character.  The other characters are entertaining enough, though I found two out of the three faction leaders to be rather creepy...

You don't have the option to play as anyone other than Rico.

If you like big explosions, and lots of them (and who doesn't??) then this is the game for you.  If you're into storytelling... well, maybe not so much.