So I just begrudgingly finished this game with a buddy after a marathon session. I cannot recommend anyone play this game. Bloated without cause in the pursuit of a large world and lots of "content" in lieu of meaningful narrative/gameplay is how I would put it. The environments are beautiful and reasonably diverse. The game has lots of weapons and weapon attachments to play with. The gunplay is solid. That's about where the praise ends.
Once you've done one or two regions missions, for the most part you've seen all the variety you're going to see. Every missions, even the higher ranking under bosses are just a variation of a few scenarios. Kill someone in a base, destroy something in a base, interrogate someone, extract someone. Tail someone and then do one of said things. Sometimes you can't be detected. The only real variations are locations.
The UI, abilities and interaction are... ok. But where it falls apart is in actually using tools, it's so annoying to have to d-pad through items and likely get yourself killed while trying to switch to things like flash-bangs that you end up generally just ignore them as spending 5-6 seconds flipping through and maybe over jumping it will likely get you killed trying to use them in combat. A simple 4 way d-pad navigation for different tools would have been nice. But it seems a lot of things were overlooked or just ignored. Even small things like seeing time in game requiring you to deploy a drone. Which is ridiculous. Not that it's a deal breaker but there's just countless little nitpicks about things that were absent or poorly planned.
The depth of the narrative at any given point is a short video, some text/audio files you can find and that's it. Even though each under-boss has a unique role, in action, how they behave, their crew or interaction with their environment is pretty much non-existent. Regions don't change depending on your actions, they are completely static and never really do anything. So don't expect anything cool in terms of reactions or changes depending on your progression in the game or on their "stories".
The game is chock full of collectible items and rebel missions but they're pretty non interesting. They seem to exist in an overbearing fashion in the game, just because they needed to fill the world and give a lengthy set of goals for those who want to die inside trying to platinum/100% the game.
The rebel missions generally just kind of dumb the game down as you progress. being able to instantly summon helicopters, drop mortar strikes or reinforcements at the drop of the hat wherever you are with relatively short cool-downs makes them replacements for actually having to plan and execute ingress, mission execution and egress. By the end of the game, even as a really good handling/pilot, we were literally crashing helicopters into bases, grabbing whatever was there and spamming drone medic abilities just to just get through it as fast as possible because it had gotten so tedious.
I can't think of anything I found really memorable about the game and it's story or why I would recommend it to anyone. I initially enjoyed it because, well I just enjoy playing games with friends in co-op more than anything. But even that wasn't enough to save the game from mediocrity. For me that's saying something, as I can bear through some really crappy co-op games, but at least generally they don't drag on unnecessarily for dozens of hours. It is very much a copy paste game. A few moving pieces for resources but everything else is generally a static copy of what you've already done repeated in varying locales.I wish they had focused on a tighter focused story around moral ambiguity and agency. Instead we got a very shallow cliched, Tom Clancy title that was a mile wide and an inch deep.
TLDR: The game was a burgeoning mess of tedious tasks in lieu of interesting dynamic elements that would have made taking down a cartel in a cliched story at least more tolerable. Even co-op isn't enough to save this game from becoming a mile wide inch deep title.
