| Description |
Unlike most modern-day military-themed first-person shooters, Shadows Ops: Red Mercury is more about pure run-and-gun action than about relatively realistic squad tactics. It seems like a fully featured game on paper, boasting a single-player campaign of more than two dozen missions, as well as several multiplayer modes that are playable online by up to 32 players. As well, Shadow Ops features some impressive audio, and its campaign offers a ton of targets to shoot at and a high level of challenge even on the default difficulty setting (which is an easier setting, and there are two even tougher settings available, as well). The campaign missions can indeed be pretty intense at times, but the underlying action itself lacks the sort of visceral punch that shooters ought to have. This isn't as big of an issue in the heavily scripted single-player levels, but Shadow Ops' clunky multiplayer gameplay significantly suffers for it. The result is a first-person shooter that does little to distinguish itself from many other, similar games.
Sometimes you'll have friendlies at your side, but Shadow Ops is mostly a one-man-army affair.
Shadow Ops was originally released on the Xbox several months ago, and the new PC version isn't much different. It's playable at higher resolutions, though the shortcomings of the graphics just stand out more readily that way. And while the mouse and keyboard controls should theoretically be more precise than the console version's gamepad controls, in reality, the opposite is true. The ugly onscreen targeting reticule here points toward nothing in particular, turning precision shooting into mere guesswork. Unsurprisingly, the PC version lacks the Xbox version's split-screen mode, though it theoretically makes up for this with an expanded multiplayer mode (the Xbox version only supports eight players online). However, online play is still bland and problematic, and barely anyone's playing online anyway. On the plus side, the game ships on DVD-ROM, so at least the installation process is painless.
The game is clearly derivative of successful military-themed arcade-style shooters such as the Medal of Honor series and Call of Duty, though this one isn't based on real events. Captain Frank Hayden is the hero of Shadow Ops' campaign, and he's your typical gruff gun-toting action hero. Apparently he's good at getting important jobs done, since he's part of a Special Forces team charged with recovering something called red mercury--a substance that's capable of bringing nuclear destruction upon the free world--which has fallen into the wrong hands. Hayden's efforts to recover the red mercury will send him to locations like war-torn Middle Eastern towns, the jungles of the Congo, snowy Kazakhstan, and the subways of Paris. The story takes a couple of twists as it unfolds in prerendered cutscenes between many of the missions, and while these cutscenes are grainy and unimpressive for the most part, they're presented with the sort of shaky camera angles and fast editing that has become Hollywood's favorite way to depict military action.
Regardless of what the stakes are and where the missions supposedly take place, they pretty much all play out the same way. They're completely linear, which means there's never any alternative but to keep pressing forward past droves of enemy grunts, who will often come at you in waves, lie in ambush around corners, or snipe at you from windows or rooftops. Though most of the enemy behavior seems to be scripted, foes exhibit some noticeable signs of intelligence, such as when they rush from cover to cover and otherwise stick their necks out only when shooting at you. Foes will also sometimes chuck grenades at you or, better yet, toss back one of your own. These occasionally inspired bad guys are relatively few, though. You'll mostly just be gunning down tons of enemy clones that pop up like targets in a shooting gallery. And even when the situation seems hopeless as foes keep pouring in, you'll learn to see through the ruse--the flow of bad guys stops as quickly as it starts, inviting you to casually scour the area for health and ammo and then move on to the next firefight.
You'll usually have several weapons--a pistol, a sniper rifle, and an assault rifle--in addition to a few grenades. Occasionally you get a shotgun, a heavy machiPassword: No password specified
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