This is a piece of shit. It's ugly, buggy and is stylistically pretty much the sick fantasy of a Halo nerd. But then again, the story does try, and comes up with an interesting and fresh premise, carried out in the cheesiest comic book style possible. And this is tasty cheese. Although it stops making any sense near the end, even to the point of not even coherently transitioning from one scene to the next. There's a poor attempt at multiple choices, but you generally don't feel it save for a supporting character being swapped out.
While the controls are lackluster on the PC they get the job done. Though you may need to manually configure a few .ini's to get your gamepad working right.
The soundtrack is wonderful. Beautiful to the bone, rivalling the most epic film scores. The sound mix however is terrible, it even contains a level whose entire sound consists pretty much solely of a single all overpowering white noise drowning out everything else. I think it's supposed to be wind but it doesn't really come through that way. Generally the music doesn't fit the situation thanks to the simplistic and unbalanced mix. The soundtrack is a much better way to enjoy this aspect. Most of the time either you can't hear the music or it drowns out everything else.
The prerendered cutscenes are stunning visually, though some that seem to be rendered in the game engine with FRAPS or something like that are ugly and stuttering, with no fix as the stuttering is encoded in the video. The graphics are decent enough, but they are aging and could be better even then. Animations are good as well, the aforementioned nosie level may be unbearable to hear, it is visually captivating with a very impressive animation of the level being torn apart. Though the gameplay suffers from the numerous sometimes gamebreaking sometimes just confusing bugs.
If, however you can stand the crashing, the mission critical allies dissapearing or teleporting outside the level or wherever they now went, the glitchy vehicles etc. You're in for a real treat. There's a good selection of powers with a good system for switching between them and a ton of fun and diverse weapons and the movement is impressive and engaging. Most of the time it plain doesn't work. But when it does, Advent Rising represents the epitome of straight up badass arcade action. Sail through the air in slowmotion as you headshot multiple enemies simultaneously before switching to your "force push" power to deflect missiles right back in the face of the sender and landing with an impressive and deadly melee strike. Dance around your enemies with melee, send them flying and blast them into oblivion in the greatest, most epic, and sadly shittiest and buggiest action game of all time.
If only they'd done it good so we could have the other two games to finish the halfway decent story.
Despite the numerous and unbearable flaws, it does what it does well, well enough to impress me, and the story is epic and engaging even though it only represents the first act of a trilogy and dissasembles into mad incoherency near the end. It's great. If only it'd been good too it would have gotten a five.