Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In

It's pointless to review a game that 5 people played 20 years ago, who is this going to help? But I'm gonna.

But how do I do it without adding "for the time" after each sentence? Because for the time - the game was impressive. Today, like most late 90's games - not quite. Yet I still managed to have some fun with it.

The graphics were impressive, for the time. How expansive and endless the terrain was - wow! Of course now you look at it... you don't see any trees, any grass, any details whatsoever, both outside and inside the same 3 re-used buildings... It's the bare minimum of creating a world. It lacks any details whatsoever.

The music was impressive, for the time... and still sounds great. So do the sound effects.

The voice acting was great for the time too. Let's not forget what voice acting in video games was in the late 90's and early 2000's - horrific. But in IGI it's not bad at all. I like both the protagonist and his handler's voice work.

The gameplay can be fun too, even today. I actually enjoyed the incredibly terrible AI. Gunning down a solider loudly, as another one watches and doesn't react in any way. Hilarious. If you get acclimated to the game's mechanics it can be enjoyable for a while. Of course with the music and story and voice acting you'd think they were going for a realistic setting, so the AI kind of breaks it. But hey - you can have fun.

What's not fun is the inability to save, almost non-existing opportunities to restore health, insanely accurate AI when it comes to gunning you down at a vast distance, and just generally NPC's spawning from nowhere and raining bullets on you just when you were finally about to finish that tedious long level you had to replay 10 times from the very start.

It's a strange game. A lot of people, including myself, remember it fondly. It can still be fun if you're willing to adapt to it's many quirks. It seems like plenty of care was put into some aspects of it, and almost zero in others. I don't understand why, maybe it was rushed, maybe the budget was cut. Regardless, it's still a decent game. If only it had more variety and generally more fun missions, and more detail, it could've been up there with such other classics from the time, such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

I'd sure like to know what the development process was, and the reasons behind all those strange choices. Also they never really made it clear what I.G.I. stands for, if anything, so that's kind of irritating.