Each sortie begins with a text briefing (complete with embarrassing voiceovers) and ends with a laundry list of objectives you've either completed or failed. Unsurprisingly, this disjointed narrative completely destroys any sense of story continuity as you travel from one exotic locale to the next. Rather than making you feel like you're Joanna Dark in her struggle against arch-nemesis dataDyne, you wander each of the levels without an arc or mission context. You could be Joanna Dark. Or maybe you're just a psycho on a warpath who has to flip a bunch of switches, unlock a bunch of doors, hack some computer terminals, and flip more switches just so you can move onto the next level in a quest to satisfy your appetite for destruction. While there are still a ton of reasons why the game is unquestionably worthy of your Xbox 360 launch dollar, its single-player storyline is not one of them.
But who the hell plays a shooter for its overrated storyline anyways, right?