Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by
UbiSoft

The premise is extremely simple. Although you are in control of an elite counter-terrorist unit, beginning with around 8 men running around onscreen, only two of them are under your direct control in each mission while the rest provide backup to other areas of the buildings you're trying to neutralise. From time to time your paths do cross again, but too many cooks do spoil the broth and if there's too many people around you, you may as well sack trying to send your own men in to battle and just wade in yourself. Before I mention the bad parts, I'll start by saying that the best thing about this game is the sound effects. Turn around and shoot and listen to the bullets ricochet all over the shop. Tremendous. The bad? The graphics seem rather sparse and are everything you've seen before, even if they do move about well. Also the gameplay does become very repetitive: enter a building or area, take out baddies here, there and everywhere and, eventually, move on to the next scenario.

Also, while you can tell your men to open a door, throw in a flashbang to stun the baddies inside, then storm the room and shoot them, there's some incredibly poor AI going on as said soldiers try to enter the room. They sometimes jitter about, walking into the door frames instead, and by the time they finally make their move INTO the room... the baddies are alive and well and return fire. Oh, and on a few occasions the dimwits have thrown a flashbang in the same damn room they're standing in! Duh! Something else that's annoying is when you want them to follow you across an expanse of land before you get discovered. Suddenly they'll just stop to shoot at some baddies and however much I tell them to follow me they just carry on regardless, get shot and are killed. Idiots! The game is fun for a while but it does get a bit on the dull side after the first two or three missions when you realise things won't change a great deal the further you progress. As for the tactics applied during the missions, it boils down to solve the world's crises, collecting important information and defusing bombs by holding down the action key for a few seconds.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ENJOYMENT
OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2002.

This game was played on a PC with the following spec:
Intel PIII 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM (133 Mhz), ATI Radeon 8500LE AGP, Soundblaster Live! 1024.