Atari made big noises about Shadow Ops: Red Mercury’s Hollywood-style production values, and an exciting intro will leave you in no doubt that this game badly wants to be a super-glamorous and action-packed Rainbow Six – you can almost hear the designers saying “We want George Clooney to play the lead in the movie”…
Sadly, it soon becomes apparent that that is not going to be the case, and this is despite some seriously good points. SORM’s exciting (if occasionally cheesy) storyline; You play Frank Hayden, an elite Delta Force operative recruited by the CIA to track down a new weapon of mass destruction known as Red Mercury. The game has really excellent sound (THX certified, no less), tense music and realistic weapons, but SORM’s graphics let it down time and time again. From the first (Black Hawk Down-style) level, the frame rate is disappointing and several glitches are apparent, with major clipping problems (enemies pass into walls and die floating in mid air – we even had one standing on the water of the docks level and shooting at us) and a frame rate that jitters throughout. Explosions are really weak too – despite sounding substantial and damaging, both hand grenades (you can throw and roll them) and RPGs look really wimpy – these are the complete opposite to your other firearms, which feel chunky and do a satisfying amount of damage. So even with its less then amazing graphics SORM sucks you in with its storyline and edgy gun battles.
The story is told with truly cinematic cut scenes that use the game engine, and as dramatic and well directed as they are, the unremarkable graphics engine lets them down - all the character models have weird, staring eyes, and Frank’s love interest looks like a trout-lipped inflatable sex doll – and unless you’re into that sort of thing, it kind of detracts from things…
The enemy AI is one thing that strikes you early on; they seem extremely aggressive compared to your average FPS, and throughout the game they keep getting more and more so. This might sound stupid and naïve of me after the events of the last few years, but they really are a suicidal lot, so dedicated to the cause that they usually charge at you yelling and shooting, and they do this so frequently that you soon come to expect one to be around every corner – this could be down to simplistic AI routines, but some enemies do take cover and display a little more realistic and believable desire for self-preservation – whatever the case, the mixture between “aggressive nutter” type enemies and “entrenched sniper” is a good one, and always keeps you on your toes as progress through the levels (we played it on the default ‘Ranger’ setting and it’s no doddle to finish). When you kill the bad guys, and you will kill HUNDREDS during the game, they have some good death animations and what looks like ragdoll physics stop the moment they hit the ground, and most bodies disappear quite quickly. Gameplay is also often hampered by sticky scenery – it’s not exactly cutting edge stuff.
As you chase the rogue-nuke-owning terrorists around the world, you get to have some exciting and testing (depending on what difficulty level of 4 that you play on) missions set in a Middle-East town, jungle, high-tech installation, docks, tube station – in fact, all kinds of war-torn hellholes get a look in, and sometimes I suspect like me, you’ll feel like you’ve been there before in other shooters; One mission that sees you ‘protect the girl as she accesses the computer in the high tech HQ’ seems remarkably reminiscent of good old Goldeneye, jungle levels reminded me of Soldier of Fortune... There’s also a nice mix to the gunplay action; sniping, close-quarters combat, manning fixed machine guns and there’s even a nice melee attack if you get caught too close to a ‘Tango’ or reloading. SORM also has a neat aiming mode; if you hold the left trigger the view zooms in a fraction (or a lot if the weapon has a scope – zoom is adjusted with the D-Pad) and then you’re locked in position, the left stick (normally movement) then controls leaning left and right (for peeking round corners) and ducking or popping up – it makes shootouts great fun and more instinctive than most other shooters.
Shadow Ops has an excellent splitscreen co-op mode, it’s sadly only ten levels long, without any cinematic linking cut scenes as in the solo game, but it plays really well as your buddy is well-animated and the frame rate acceptable. The co-op specific levels echo the main story mode’s, and offer plenty of Rainbow Six-style tactical cover-and-advance type action. The splitscreen multiplayer works pretty well too, but suffers with frame rate problems in the same way as the main game. Sadly the online multiplayer game isn’t in the same class, with horrendous lag and collision detection issues coupled to lengthy loading times. Games were initially hard to come across, and when we finally did they were often over before we knew what the heck was going on – thankfully in the same way as Unreal 2 you can host a game and learn the multiplayer levels, but that doesn’t cure the simply shameful loading times, iffy frame rate and laggy gameplay. Maybe they can patch the problems, but you just won't believe how badly this game plays compared to the Xbox's better online shooters. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and V.I.P. Escort modes all play equally poorly, and the one thing that might have saved SORM’s online bacon, a co-op mode, is strangely absent – you DO NOT BUY this game for the online gaming, believe me you don't.
Shadow Ops is a strange game – a huge project with some very good bits, some very bad bits and ambitions that the aging Unreal game engine couldn’t quite pull off. Don’t leave this review with the wrong impression - it’s not a bad game, far from it, but you get the feeling it could have been truly top notch. Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is a good try at doing a sort of cinematic James Bond/Conflict Desert Storm/Rainbow Six beater, but it ends up missing the target by some way.
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