You know - sometimes you look at a game’s packaging, examine the screenshots, and can’t wait to play it – and if you’re anything like me you’re often disappointed with the hollowness of the gameplay or the lack of originality. CT Special Forces: Fire For Effect was just the opposite, unimpressive on the outside, but with a heart of spectacular action-packed gold. This is the first foray into 3D for the CT Special Forces brand and, at a budget price, a darned good start.
CT Special Forces (the CT stands for Counter-Terrorism) is an all-action game that sees you playing as two different characters. Stealth Owl, an expert in precision shooting, free fall parachuting and stealth, and Raptor, a meathead Marine-type specialist in heavy weapons and situations requiring close combat and big guns. Playing from behind Owl or Raptor you can aim your weapons in first person (a la Conflict Desert Storm or Ghost Recon 2), and lean around corners, duck and use cover rather like another, criminally ignored PS2 shooter Kill.Switch.
Raptor and Owl also get to use some vehicles throughout the game; Raptor’s hovercraft (armed with a machine gun that never runs out of ammo!), jeeps, boats and a skidoo on a snowy level. Owl also gets inserted into missions via spectacular free-fall missions (some of which seem impossible to complete at first, and are completely ridiculous as the sky fills with missiles, all of which are aimed at you), - these death-defying plunges play a bit like Nintendo’s Pilot Wings would, if Quentin Tarantino had scripted the game. The two guys have rechargeable energy cells; Raptors powers his electronic shield armour, and Owl’s allows him to use stealth camouflage (turn invisible, basically) or different vision modes; Thermal, Enhanced (night vision) and Sonar (allows you to see through some doors).
There’s a nice selection of weapons, and thanks to some lively physics both in terms of scenery and enemy ragdoll effects, they're all very pleasing to use. You get the typical assault rifles, machine guns, a sniper rifle, rocket launcher etc., as well as some rather more innovative electromagnetic grenades (that can attract metal objects or repel them, snatching weapons from the hands of the enemy or smashing metal debris into them!) and even an electric gun that frazzles the bad guys like they've been struck by lightning.
Fire for Effect’s cornball story (the Nemesis terrorist organisation plans to build a better AI super-computer than the CTSF’s yadda yadda…) will keep you playing till the end and atmosphere is added by excellent sound effects. The music is worth a mention and it never fails to sound appropriate and cool. As you traverse the massive levels you’ll expend more ammo in than in several other shooters put together, and likely cringe at a couple of graphical glitches, but for a budget title you get an amazing amount of bang for your buck, and this is truly an action title not to be missed.
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