Someone's definitely going to release a third person shooter called "OH NO, IT'S ANOTHER THIRD-PERSON SHOOTER" - it'd sell by the truckload for sure. But this one's got one heck of a cool name; Kill.Switch, and despite initial reservations about the graphics (it's a souped-up PS2 game), Kill.Switch gave us some of the best shoot 'em up action we've had in quite a while…

   

In Kill.Switch you play as a soldier controlled by a neural interface remotely from the battlefield (EH? I hear you say). The story is a different one alright; you're trying to start a war instead of the usual war prevention job. To do this you'll have to complete missions around the world trying to drag everyone into the war. Missions involve the theft of prototype nukes, blowing up oilrigs and just plain disturbing the peace.

The main part of the gameplay mechanic, and Kill.Switch's gimmick is all about taking cover. By holding down the right mouse button you can hug walls and duck behind objects. Whilst behind cover you can either lean out and fire or "blind" fire round the corner (just stick your gun out), which is safer, but much less accurate. You can also lob grenades over the top to flush out hiding enemies. The ducking and diving is really well done. The enemies you'll face aren't always the smartest, some times they'll hide and throw grenades but other times they just stand in the open waiting to get shot. The enemy AI has all the abilities to duck and dive that you do, but they don't seem to use it much.

   

There are a few different weapons chucked in like sniper rifles, AK's, shotguns, and sub-machine guns. But apart from the sniper rifle there's little difference between the different weapons apart from the fire rate. While the game is intense the missions can be over really quickly, you can even just run through a lot of the levels simply blasting away. This means that the samey missions get stale quickly, and that you're unlikely to be replaying Kill.Switch.

Graphically, while not exactly ugly, Kill.Switch isn't up to the standards of other recent third person shooters like Max Payne 2. It uses the Renderware™ engine and while that engine is impressive on some PS2 titles, it isn't very impressive on a 2004 PC. The characters look nice and the environments look decent enough, and it all runs extremely smoothly (unlike the PS2 version) on my AMD2500 and should run well on the minimum 800mhz computer.

   

Sound-wise you'll hear some atmospheric sci-fi-y tunes and your usual array of gunfire and screams. The voice acting is ok but not great - and without dropping any spoilers the convoluted back story kind of leaves things hanging (all ready for a sequel).

Overall I think Kill.Switch is a console game that should be played on your console. But it's still a cool, playable blast 'em up with a nice twist story wise.