Shadow Ops: Red Mercury

It's The Naked Gun of videogames.
Not by design, but by accident.

This game has everything you'll ever want in an FPS title: almost endless, borderline comical enemy spawns that makes clown cars look reasonable, linear boring levels with no checkpoints whatsoever, ammo scarcity that rivals some genuine military sims, wild glitches with dumb as rocks NPCs and story that's both incredibly serious and astonishingly dumb at the same time.

All the jokes aside, Shadow Ops: Red Mercury manages to be enjoyable almost despite itself and every gamedesign and storytelling flaw one can imagine. At a glance it looks like any other bland shooter of 2000s (go shoot some bad guys and save the world, go-go-go), and some moments are somehow look like they inspired Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, but there's some unique charm in its sugar-rushed stupidity. In fact, it never stops being entertaining because of it. Every cutscene has to be the most intense cutscene to be put in a game with different camera tricks that emulate best and worst action movies of its era (just ignore low bitrate); every line of dialogue has to be epic, with line reading so impassioned and loud William Shatner would blush; every plot point and plot twist just has to be bigger than the last and needs to be totally unexpected, even if it means putting 5 of them in a row in a span of a minute. You'd think that at some point developers would stop and let the game (and the player) breathe, but no, like any good parody Red Mercury just keeps building up and up until you fight the inevitable helicopter boss at the top of Eiffel Tower and destroy it with nuclear briefcase that stops being nuclear after John ShadowOps's girlfriend hacks the bioweapon out of it in the last possible moment. It's shameless and it's perfect.

This is one of the greatest unintentional videogame comedies of all time, and no matter what kind of shooter you imagined just now, Shadow Ops: Red Mercury will surprise and challenge you.

don't waste your money

Nice surprise this game. Playing it in 2025 feels like meet an old friend. That old games had atmosphere. All kind of locations, great music and sound effects, really good cutscenes for the year. I really enjoyed playing this game but missions without option to quicksave or at least some checkpoints sometimes drove me crazy. You have to play complete mission without them. Some of the missions were too hard to do in one go. Even playing this game at default normal difficulty was sometimes a nightmare. But overall this game is gold. There is even one stealth mission ! Highly recomend this game!

Dis ya game a di realest, most cinematic military shooter, like Fortnite! Yuh fi get seh yuh a play game, it feel like yuh deh inna di army fi real! Yuh ago have post-traumatic stress after dis one! It remind I of Yaad—Jamaica—yuh neva know wah a go pop up outta di alleyway! Big up, mon! I an I!

old, generic game on top of it it's an annoying game don't really see constant lack of ammo and hordes of enemies fitting together

Odd fps game that seemingly masquerades as being realistic, while the plot is practically about saving the world in a manner of Spiderman and Jason Bourne. The milieu has enough variety and the scenery changes enough to keep the game from becoming boring. Some of the missions have some difficult parts and because there's no checkpoint system you have to start again after failing, but it's not a difficult game by any mean. Health and ammo are plentiful and there's a variety of guns to shoot. The game's not a masterpiece, but it's good enough to spend an evening with.

A silly and action packed game - with a surprisingly long single player game. Cheesy story with changing levels, this was developed and put out during the XBOX and PS2 era and it shows. The levels are short and usually have you running and gunning from start of the level to the finish.

Oddly enough even on easy difficulty I found there was a lack of ammo for weapons since you can not pick up weapons from dead enemies. Also it seems most enemies take 2 shots to kill - no matter the weapon, so weapons like sniper rifles feel weak compared to the auto rifles and sub machine guns in the game.

A fun simple game - easily worth the $1 I paid for it.

This is literally the most generic game of all time. It's a COD ripoff (100% linear game) combined with the most generic visuals and gameplay of all time. I guess people give it a positive rating for nostalgia reasons but even when I played this game back in the days it felt generic to me.