Story

• You play as Gideon Wyeth, the brother of a popular war hero Ethan Wyeth.
• Gideon and Ethan are called upon to go on a “first contact” mission to board an alien ship that has peacefully arrived in orbit around your planet.
• There you meet an alien race called the Aurelians, who you quickly learn have been searching for humans for years and revere them as gods.
• Unfortunately, they also reveal that they were followed by another alien race called the Seekers who want to destroy the human race.
• From this point on, Gideon is trapped in a battle of survival filled with major events, political unrest, and plot twists.
• The storyline of the game was co-created by award winning sci-fi novelist Orson Scott Card.
• Most of the story is pretty interesting, with movie like presentation and integrated cut-scenes into the gameplay.
• Occasionally some of the dialogue can seem odd.
• Still, the story is probably the best part of the game.

Gameplay

• The game begins, by having you land your space shuttle onto the space station in orbit around the planet, and next to where the alien ship has parked.
• This got me excited by making me think that there would be both space combat and ground combat in the game.
• Alas though, you NEVER pilot a space craft again in the game.
• It’s a completely useless first bit of gameplay.
• A great disappointment in retrospect, especially when there was plenty of opportunity to do so.
• The early levels of the game serve as a tutorial with a few more of the small objectives feeling pointless.
• You learn how to move, target, melee fight, and shoot guns.
• Herein lays the first major problem of the game -- the targeting system.
• Like most first or third person shooters you move your character around the world with the left stick, and you change the camera or the view with the right stick.
• The targeting system used is called the “flick” system.
• The idea is to “flick” the right stick in the direction of the enemy you want to target.
• This ends up being quite a problem.
• Once you target an enemy, the view is locked to that enemy.
• This makes running away, or moving in an unseen direction hard.
• You can unlock your target, by pressing in the right stick, but as soon as you try to look at where you want to go (with the right stick) you will most likely lock onto another enemy.
• At times this can get very frustrating, when caught in a highly stressful situation.
• In the times where you don’t want to run or need to look away from enemies for navigational purposes, you will find that the overall run-n-gun feel of the game is pretty fun.
• Some of the early levels have objectives that are quite silly.
• In some, all you have to do is walk, run, drive or fly from point A to point B.
• One such objective sees you escorting your injured brother to safety basically ignoring the combat around you.  
• These parts advance the story nicely but add no gameplay value.
• The rest of the game is broken up into six chapters.
• Each chapter is further broken into a number of sections.
• Once these sections are completed you can replay any section of any previously played chapter from the game menu.
• Each section has several objectives and checkpoints.
• The checkpoints serve as automatic save points for when you die, but will not be accessible from the game menu.
• One positive aspect about the checkpoint system, is that they are pretty frequent, meaning that you won’t have to replay too much of any one area just to get by a tricky part of a chapter.
• Throughout the game Gideon will have to shoot his way out of a lot of trouble.
• In the beginning, Gideon will have access to a good number of human and alien weapons, but by the end of the game he will also have acquired a number of “superhuman powers” that will aide him in his struggle.
• Gideon can dual wield any of the guns that are in the game.
• Faust C-41 - .90 caliber pistol with armor-piercing rounds.
• XJ9 – Assault rifle with sub mounted grenade launcher.
• Talmage – Fires self-propelled rockets which can be fired straight or guided along a sonic pathway.
• H.A.Z.E. – Fires plasma-coated radioactive matter which can fuse explosively upon contact.
• Acolyte – Standard issue Seeker pulse-rifle.
• Kaull – Another Seeker rifle producing charge-stripped ions that tear through spacetime.
• Darkfire – Fires muon fragments of dark-matter and then accelerates them along a threaded high gravity bore. It can also release short-range explosives.
• Talon – The Seeker’s version of a plasma pistol.
• Shadowstalker – A Seeker weapon that is like a sniper rifle. Has as scope that has different levels of zoom based on the level of the weapon.
• Discord – Generates immense heat for short periods of time that serves as a defensive radius around the weapon.
• Fury – The Seeker’s version of a rocket launcher. Also capable of guiding implosion rockets towards several targets at once.