To say that I was disappointed by Breakdown implies that I had high expectations going in, which, unfortunately, I did.

16 years after its original release, it doesn't have much of a reputation, so my hopes were based on first impressions. The game has a fascinating opening act, including the famous first-person barfing scene, which may be the only thing this game is known for anymore. The pitch of the game seems to be a high degree of immersion. This was meant to be achieved in a couple of ways: one, the game never leaves your character's first-person perspective. The only way you even know what you look like is by looking in a mirror. Second, all actions happen in real time. Whether you're reloading a weapon, picking up and inspecting an object, or eating a protein bar, you watch it happen--however long it takes. The third way is by reducing the visual elements of the interface to just a health bar and an energy bar, as well as a lock-on indicator. I think all of these concepts could have worked well with better execution, but as they are, each ends up causing more frustration than immersion.

Gameplay in Breakdown mostly revolves around combat, which comes in two flavors: shooting humans and punching aliens. Much of the combat in the early game pits you against mundane human soldiers with guns, and gives you a gun or two of your own to shoot back. It's pretty standard stuff, with one strange twist: shooting effectively (relatively, anyway) requires locking on. There's no typical crosshair, and immersion be damned, you can't use the weapons' own iron sights. Tap A to point vaguely at the nearest target's center of mass and pull the right trigger to shoot. Tapping A again cycles through targets in a highly unpredictable order, so it's best to take cover around a corner and focus on one at a time. Protagonist Derrick is not a very good shot, either (probably because he's always firing from the hip), so expect most of your firefights to come down to facing down your opponent and burning through magazines until one of you is dead. It's not very engaging, and makes a lot of encounters feel like a coin toss. Thankfully, pretty early into the game, you start unlocking superpowers. These allow you to block bullets as well as to overcome the same bullet-blocking ability in the game's other enemy type: The T'lan.

T'lan are grey, human-like super-soldiers with immense strength and an intimidatingly uniform appearance. Being immune to gunfire, you'll have to resort to fisticuffs against these bad boys. Now, I'll be the first to say that first-person punching is cool, and Derrick has an impressive move list to play with, including not only punches and kicks but flips and rolls and, later on, some energy attacks too. Unfortunately, this is another system that falls apart in application. Different moves are performed by pressing either or both triggers in combination with a direction on the left stick--the same left stick that's used to move. This means that most of your neutral moves, including the incredibly important shockwave ability, can't be done while moving. The tolerance for movement is a little unclear, so it's pretty common that a hook come out when you want a jab, or slide tackle come out when you want a shockwave. This often means the difference between landing a killing blow and getting knocked on your ass--which, in first person, can be pretty disorienting. Worse, blocking is performed by clicking and holding the left stick, which makes moving while blocking a pretty delicate situation. Now add in the fact that enemies often come in numbers and from different angles, and you never know which way you're going to be facing when you try to change lock-on targets, and you can start to imagine why this isn't the kung-fu simulator it could have been.

So, the shooting is bad, and the punching is bad. How about just... moving? Well, that's not so bad most of the time. Until the jumping starts. Those in the know will cringe at the thought of first-person platforming. Yep, Breakdown's got that, complete with inconsistent ledge grabbing. It's introduced in the tutorial, but thankfully doesn't come up for most of the game, but it does make a big return for two extended jumping puzzles towards the end. Half-Life fans will know the feeling.

A lot of this may seem like nitpicking, and that's fair. Any number of individual flaws don't necessarily make a bad game. Some of my favorite games are absolute trash and so am I, so why bring all this up? It comes back to Breakdown's reason to be in the first place: immersion. This game appears largely to be an attempt to push the medium's immersive quality to a new level, which is commendable. The problem with Breakdown is that it goes about this in some of the most videogamey ways possible.

I mentioned eating things in real time earlier? You do that to restore health, of course. That might not seem realistic, but blame it on Derrick's superpowers. What really gets me is that if you're at full health, you can't save food for later. That protein bar you just picked up? The one you could easily fit in any of your many pockets or pouches on your tactical vest thing? Eat it or toss it. And by toss it, I mean delete it from the game world, because it's gone for good. But even eating it only has Derrick take one bite and throw the rest away. This means that if you come across one of the game's many stashes of several protein bars and you need to heal a lot of health, you pick them each up individually, taking one bite before moving onto the next one. This is not immersive. I refuse to be immersed by this.

Oh, and about those visual interface elements I mentioned earlier. You can kiss those goodbye for the last quarter of the game. There's a good enough narrative reason for those to go way, but the result is paradoxically extremely immersion-breaking. You can't see your health or energy--except on the pause screen. If you're in the middle of a fight (and of course, the game's toughest fights take place after this point) and you want to know if you have enough energy for a flying kick or if you need to run and heal up, you have to pause. For the fights in the last hour or two of the game, I was pausing every few seconds. This change made in the name of immersion has the player spending more time looking at a menu than at what's in front of them. Now think about how the already-clunky lock-on system works when you can't even see what you're locked onto, or if you're locked onto anything at all.

Systems aside, I want to mention as well how repetitive this game is. The first half of the game takes place in the stark, rectangular, grey hallways of some underground facility. A brief trek through a sunny outdoor area then gives way to a bizarre alien landscape... which consists almost entirely of empty grey hallways. Half of those hallways are then repeated, several times, and then again in reverse. Then a plot thing happens (I don't really understand it) and you're back in the facility, but it's the future. Then you're back in the alien place, and it's the past again, but it's different because you can jump higher. Then it's the facility again, but this time there's a green filter over it because it's a dream or something? Then it's outside again and you have to drive the jeep and get to the helicopter and then it's the ending. I can honestly only think of one area in the whole game that isn't used at least twice. It might not be quite the sin it is if the places you were returning to were at least interesting, but they're not--it's always just more grey hallways.

Now listen. I want to love this game. It's weird and unique and does all kinds of things that no other game would (or should) do. It's certainly not bad in that boring, unimaginative way that the droves of Call of Duty clones and jury-rigged battle royale shooters are. But neither is it a cult classic, just a few steps from greatness. Breakdown is a fucking frustrating, disappointing, endlessly gray, 12-hour-long trash fire.