It has every cliché of the action movies, done with personality, flair and brazen tributes to Robert Rodriguez. It's got methephetamine level violence, endless outrageous stunts, fantastically timed and appropriate music tracks, memorable characters, and naturally lots of explosions. It's got an anti-hero fighting for vengeance and family honor with two-fisted guns blazing, a loose-cannon police operative swimming with sharks in murder, theft and betrayal.
The game does start weak with two prologue chapters in which you briefly play the Father (a hotshot DEA raider,) and the Good Son (a by-the-book DEA investigator,) before playing the Bad Son, a three-strike felon from California who earns and proudly wears the nickname 'El Gringo Loco'. This does allow you to pace into the action with well-timed tutorials, learning what you need to know when you need to know it without taking a contained 101 course to completely forget when the moments of pressure arrive.
This game stays more conscious of itself as a video game than most GTA-clone sandbox-wandering action games, and allows you to jump straight to the missions from a select menu, some of which are purely for the purpose of blowing people away and/or blowing things up. You can wander and collect upgrades to health, adrenaline, and weapon skill, and commit rampant destructive crimes with practically no consequence. And unlike GTA, when you carjack someone, they remain in the vehicle making panicked comments in Spanish. If you really want to get your unwilling passenger excited, try jumping from the vehicle while it's still speeding.
The special attacks are either exaggerated, superhuman action stunts, or purely zany. But for all the powerful arsenal you can gather, once you master your handgun you need nothing else for lethal efficiency and maximum killing points, which become more and more important to successful completion of missions. Well, that handgun and the occasional explosive, for when you need to turn something to smithereens quickly, or when you notice you've got too many grenades. The important strategy is to keep killing, and with maximum style, and you'll get all the bonuses you need to keep going, and this encourages a very rapid-paced action style throughout the game.
This is a fun game with a lot of replay value, and every mission becomes available for replay after you've succeeded the last story mission, even the optional ones you may have skipped.
The game does start weak with two prologue chapters in which you briefly play the Father (a hotshot DEA raider,) and the Good Son (a by-the-book DEA investigator,) before playing the Bad Son, a three-strike felon from California who earns and proudly wears the nickname 'El Gringo Loco'. This does allow you to pace into the action with well-timed tutorials, learning what you need to know when you need to know it without taking a contained 101 course to completely forget when the moments of pressure arrive.
This game stays more conscious of itself as a video game than most GTA-clone sandbox-wandering action games, and allows you to jump straight to the missions from a select menu, some of which are purely for the purpose of blowing people away and/or blowing things up. You can wander and collect upgrades to health, adrenaline, and weapon skill, and commit rampant destructive crimes with practically no consequence. And unlike GTA, when you carjack someone, they remain in the vehicle making panicked comments in Spanish. If you really want to get your unwilling passenger excited, try jumping from the vehicle while it's still speeding.
The special attacks are either exaggerated, superhuman action stunts, or purely zany. But for all the powerful arsenal you can gather, once you master your handgun you need nothing else for lethal efficiency and maximum killing points, which become more and more important to successful completion of missions. Well, that handgun and the occasional explosive, for when you need to turn something to smithereens quickly, or when you notice you've got too many grenades. The important strategy is to keep killing, and with maximum style, and you'll get all the bonuses you need to keep going, and this encourages a very rapid-paced action style throughout the game.
This is a fun game with a lot of replay value, and every mission becomes available for replay after you've succeeded the last story mission, even the optional ones you may have skipped.