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| Solid Sneak-er reporting for duty, sir | This feels like coming out from a Tom Cruise action film |
This goes the same with Metropolis Software’s Soldier Elite, having an alcoholic ex-military guy (with salt-and-pepper hair) named White Fox as the lead character who gets to be reluctantly hired for a mission. Unbelievably so, this seems to be a story poorly written. With unrealistic inconsistent themes of mixing stealth missions in sunken nuclear submarines with zombies (???), you’d be amused how this thing was put together. Even if it did want to pattern its story with Metal Gear Solid, it lacks the complex plot that lured Metal Gear Solid’s avid followers. Starting off by having him dropped over in a gloomy Artic place, White Fox’s mission is required to be done at a military facility. And if the cold war-era environment wasn’t enough, the station is sternly manned by unfriendly soldiers. Talk about nostalgic joy made worse.
Going through the stealth activity, you would be surprised why it’s called stealth in the first place. For one, the main character can’t even crouch to hide himself behind boulders. Not even stealth weapons to make up for the lack of stealth activity. Adding to the damage was White Fox’s sluggish movements that the enemies could tell where he’s at. The faster he moves, the noisier it gets – oh well, the enemies don’t seem to mind, anyway, unless it’s gunfire; they get alert like police dogs when hearing gunshots. The only way that could guarantee survival in this mode was to avoid your enemies – at all costs! Or better yet, terminate the mission by running away (Run, White Fox, run…!).
The game play itself can be very frustrating. Enemies are so powerful that they can take advantage of you any moment. Imagine this: you use your “trusty” radar to see whether the enemies are within your range. But lo! Some of them (the high-ranking ones) could not be detected by your Radar. Your drunkard character’s line of sight seems to have also been affected with all that booze. To add fuel to the fire, your ammunition seems too weak as compared with their easy-shooting weapons. Just think, your gun load is good for shooting an enemy or two – then you’d have to reload again; but the weapons are not abundantly scattered throughout the place, so that’s another problem for you. By the time you have acquired some reinforcements, a hoard of Star Wars-rip off robots gravitate towards you, leaving you very little time to panic and perfect opportunity to groan and press the Play Again? Option. One might wonder if the enemies were done as an insult to the gray-haired stealth. They’re either sharpshooters, or real tough guys. Gesundheit!
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| Any last words, comrade? | Rushing waves and tremendous gusts of wind spells A-C-T-I-O-N |
Views may also be adjusted during the game. By pressing the spacebar, you get to see three views: shooter (third-person), near-action and overhead views. The latter seems to be a promising view as it gives a zoomed-out perspective, giving you that edge in looking out for nearby enemies. However, it doesn’t show whatever is indicated on the onscreen minimap – it makes the view frustrating as it only made the view more difficult. White Fox’s movement can also be adjusted through using the mouse roller. When shooting, make sure that your hands are fast enough (I mean really fast) in re-adjusting your target shooting after you’ve hidden behind an element. It tends to get out of focus in movements not involving shooting.
Looking at the screen graphics…hmmm.not bad. It looks quite smooth and could match the caliber of amore recent version of Metal Gear. Color separation within the screen is evident that you get to be treated to a closely cinematic experience. Angles are shot well and visual elements bring life to the story. Character movements are fluid enough, but they seem to have limited action sequences that it seems so repetitive. You might expect more dramatic movements (or at least you believe that they got shot) when the characters are hit; but they seem to awkwardly fall that you’d think it was very bad acting (in a computer game?!). The Metal Gear look and feel of gloominess doesn’t seem to work this time.
Listening to the game sounds, you’d think that they’d take care of the weapon sounds above everything else to create that hard-action effect. I’m sorry, but this is another disappointment. Aside from the low-edge ammo audio, poorly dubbed dialogues of the characters might have you run back to the store and demand for a refund. No discrimination here, but the poor English recording of the voices made an impression that it was haphazardly done. Also, the Techno soundtrack was quite unmatched to the scenes aside from being oh-so-repetitive.
It’s such a shame that the game’s technicality potential was toppled over by the inconsistencies and other boo-boos. The equation got heavy on the negative side with a dull collection of ammunition, mediocre mission objectives, obsolete and redundant computer infiltration techniques as well as game pacing that is confusingly inconsistent. Making a fearless forecast, it might be referred to as one of the worst knock-offs of the Metal Gear Solid-genre of stealth. And oh, if you stay up late and come across those cheesy after dark reruns of old action movies, I think you might have a better idea of this game.
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| Blazing gunshots scare the hell out of ‘em | There must be something here to shoot…somebody throw in some bad guys here! |
If you are still stubbornly unmoved by the warnings and still want to buy the game, go ahead. Make your day…bad to worse.
Top Gaming Moment:
TOP GAME MOMENT
If there’s any in this game, I’d consider the gunning down of the antagonists and emerging victorious…but then, there’s another one at the back…and he shot you. You can’t fight back because, you ran out of ammo? – Look on the bright side. This is cheesy unsung-hero-got-shot stuff.
