This game is like Michael Bay and Hideo Kojima got together and made a horrible love child; it has a high-minded plot that only makes sense if you don't look at it too closely, and is delivered with all the sophistication of an action comic aimed at 12-year-olds. The dialogue consists almost entirely of tired tropes and one-liners that fall flat 94% of the time. All of the characters (playable, squad, AND NPCs) are annoying stereotypes that border on offensive at the best of moments, and at other times bugger belief by how much they got away with in this game. The basic enemies are robots whose design is completely irrational from anything but a stylistic viewpoint, and the bosses are ridiculous monstrosities that exist only in the mind of a stupid over-the-top action movie creator. There's even a jarring series of product placements, most notably by the defunct coffee stand Tully's.

Mechanically, the game does alright with its third-person action/cover shooter style. Combat is smooth and offers a variety of challenges and meaningful combat style options. However, it mostly vacillates between trivially easy combat encounters capped with frustratingly difficult boss fights (mostly... some of the bosses are also trivially easy), never once correctly nailing the challenge level/flow state target. Combat encounters are punctuated with irregular fast-twitch button press challenges that instantly fail you back to the last checkpoint, really disrupting the storytelling during what should be the most fast-paced scenes.

Not sure why I played through the whole thing. Probably because I wanted to see if my guess about how the inane plot would end was correct. XD

PS... did not play multiplayer or use the voice commands option... seems like even without issuing any commands to my squad, the combat was usually stupidly easy. So, probably just an unnecessary (and from what I read in other reviews, glitchy) gimmick.