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by Take Two Interactive

sore_ss3-01.jpg (5480 bytes)Does Take 2 hate us? I'm serious here. Do they? [No, they don't hate us. They're actually very nice folks. -- Ed.] Not only must they unleash the plague unto the world that was the first Spec Ops, they figured they had a series on their hands and decided to cheapen the PSX even more! Worse yet, it's ten dollars, so sadly you may be getting this game from "Santa" as a stocking stuffer.

Where to begin? I guess I'll list the game's redeeming points first since that'll be quicker. Hmmm... Nice cover art. The sound effects are supposed to be serious, but end up being undeniably funny. You can play Co-op. The music is pretty good. It doesn't kill you. It only froze up on me once. I think that's about it.

Now for the bad and 80% of this review.

sore_ss2-01.jpg (5730 bytes)Ok, they may pass it off as realism, but the game is far too difficult. I mean, when you can die by stepping on a one pixel large bomb, and your enemies are indistinguishable from the rest of the game, you've got yourself a problem. One of the only ways to see an enemy is to be shot by them, as that is the only time your radar will show them. Why? What's the point of a radar if you're already being shot? Not to mention that your "buddy" (as the game calls him) doesn’t help you much. I think they added this "buddy" in as a way to lower game difficulty. If a game is too difficult, what do you do? Why, you give the players more lives! Genius! As if that wasn't bad enough, the controls are piss poor as well. So, in reality, elite Rangers maneuver about as well as a shopping cart with two missing wheels? Our country is more vulnerable than I once thought.

The graphics aren’t anything to shout about either. I’d swear that the animation on these Rangers used to be twice as fast, then they found out that made them run too fast, so instead of re-doing the animation, they simply slow it down by half. What results is a character that looks like he came out of a poorly funded stop motion animation. The game world itself isn’t exactly up to PlayStation standards. I could’ve sworn we were out of the stage where trees were four polygons. As I’ve mentioned before, land mines are about one pixel wide. The only way to know if they’re present is by walking over them, and remembering on your next try. The only upside I could see to these graphics is the loading animation. It looks pretty cool.

sore_ss4-01.jpg (5987 bytes)Another thing about this game is that some of its objectives make little to no sense. Maybe I should rephrase that. Some of the ways of going about your objectives make little to no sense. Do you disarm bombs by picking up little red cards? No. For a game that is trying to impose its reality on you, it seems quite odd that they’d have slop like this in.

The music is actually above decent. It totally set the tone for some action. Sadly the rest of the game didn’t deliver. For how good the music was, the sound effects and voices were proportionally as bad. I mean, just listen to the intro, where a guy is reading the Ranger’s pact (or whatever it is). He sound so fuzzy you’d think he was on a second generation N64 game. The game is filled with barbaric sounding grunts. It is stupid, but pretty funny.

sore_ss1-01.jpg (7494 bytes)Frankly, this game just shouldn’t exist. It’s just a jumbled mess. If this game is all about stealth, then why can you shoot a guy down and the guy right next to him doesn’t notice? Ok then, it’s not about stealth. It’s an action game. Then how come you die so easily? Ok, it’s not either of those. It’s emulating real life terrorist situations. Then why are there only two men sent in for a mission?

All in all, just avoid this game. Maybe if the sales are low enough, this’ll be the last Spec Ops title we see.

David Logan   (07/24/2001)

Snapshot

Ups: Nice lookin' cover...

Downs: ...too bad about the game.

Platform:
Sony PlayStation

 


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