First things first, the beginning is rather awful. Well, the beginning of the gameplay, as the briefing cutscene is great, but more on that later. You wake up in a river that looks pretty bad and which leads you to an even worse segment. It's pretty short (around 5 minutes) and everything that follows is great, but be warned that you will need to find your gear, so you'll have to ghost a part of the mission which can get tricky, especially with some wonky patrol routes. I was very glad to have my blackjack back, and so the adventure begins.

The atmosphere of this mission ranges from okay to absolutely stunning, especially through the combination of great music and fantastic custom textures. While the voice acting is very funny and sometimes even memorable, it can still get annoying at times as some voicelines are a bit too loud and distorted, but not to the point that it actively bothered me. Additionally, I don't remember any other mission featuring such a breathtaking Hammerite cathedral.

Moving on to the gameplay, it's pretty good. There are a few custom items here and there and the level design is competent. It gives you lots of freedom in which order you want to tackle your objectives and the areas containing the objectives all felt quite distinct and some even had some pretty creative ideas. Some areas can suffer from their scale as they're sometimes a bit empty (especially in one part of the map) and I wish you could bunnyhop like in T1 but overall it wasn't that big of an issue. I liked that the higher difficulties don't needlessly force any restrictions onto you which aren't there on lower difficulties, but instead force you to venture into areas you normally would not want to enter, great stuff.

Lastly, the story isn't anything groundbreaking but I found it to be entertaining enough and it's told through a mindblowing briefing and ending cutscene, even the credits were made insanely well. This mission does feature LOTS of high quality readables regarding the hammerites and some subplots but as far as I can remember they're not needed for any gameplay related matters so you can skip them if you want to.

I'm very glad I didn't drop the mission in the first few minutes. Trust me, if you enjoy missions focused on Hammerites and don't mind a slightly fanfiction-y story, this is a great mission well worth playing despite a few rough edges. Depending on your chosen difficulty, I think you can find well over two, maybe even three hours of enjoyment here.