Dom Robinson reviews

Distributed by
Sony

Price: £24.99 Players: 1 plus online Widescreen: Yes Going through the jungles and urban badlands of Panama, what SOCOM: US Tactical Strike basically boils down to is 9 missions which can be played through as a story or 'Instant Action'. I went for the former so I could get into it more. That said, at first this title was for difficult to get into for me as I'm not a fan of this kind of game normally. However, the more I stuck with it, the more I became totally gripped and now I love it, even though there are a few problems I'll list about the game below but any such problems are not insurmountable. In each mission, there are tasks to complete such as disabling vehicles, taking photos or retrieving sensitive information. However, in each case all you'll have to do is direct your men where they need to go and the required option will appear making it easy to know what you have to do, while shooting baddies, securing hostages and reviving your men along the way.

Most of the time while you walk about, your soldiers are fairly intelligent in that they'll try and hide quickly behind walls when under fire, rather than sit there taking a bullet-riddling time, although once in a while one will stick out without comprehending that he's being cannon fodder so this does become rather infuriating and as you're being fired on and they can be patched up later, I just let them take the hits since they can't be bothered to dodge out of the way and I'll sort them out after. That's where I get to the point sometimes where I just don't feel I have the right control with this sort of game. Sometimes your men just start firing at the enemy even when you haven't told them to and would rather they sit still - okay, so you can instruct them to 'fire at will' or 'hold fire' but sometimes you forget what it was left on so maybe that's me. However, it does get confusing in the heat of battle, rather than hiding from the baddies, you can accidentally set a marker to cause you to walk headlong into them. Graphics and sound are fairly functional without being particularly outstanding in any way, but given that you're mainly just directing your men about they do a mostly reasonably job. Occasionally there are camera angle issues which can be a pain, including trying to turn around so you can 'see' a fallen colleague to heal him but you just can't do it, so you've got to run a little bit one way, turn round and then heal him. That's a bit mad. This doesn't happen often though.

Some random irritations about the game: 1. The female narrator's voice spends too long telling me what to do at the start of each mission and gets on my nerves. Then, in the game, she told me to Press X and select 'Breach with Grenade'" for a bunker, but I had no grenades left. Why is she so automated, with lacking information? Does she have a spare job as a satnav? 2. There are plenty of checkpoints in some levels, but not as many in others, so don't always send four men into battle since if they all die and you've got to cover quite a lot of ground again... 3. It's bloody annoying when you have to find a way round somewhere just because a road is supposedly blocked by a pile of ankle-high rubble(!) Okay, so as it turned out, I wasn't meant to go that way anyway, but these are meant to be tough men who know what SAS stands for, not wimps who, like Ross Kemp's appearance on Extras thought - that it stands for "Super Army Soldiers"...

Amusing things: 1. At one point as I was attending to one guy almost dying, he groaned, "I'm not going to make it!" and a moment later the one fixing him up said, "Get back to work!" and off he ran :) 2. And even when you're attending to a fallen colleague to get them back to health, he still says, "Our man needs a medic!" Er... duh! You're doing it! 3. Highlighting your men in turn or together, before issuing commands to go somewhere, made them look like something from a Ready Brek advert. Oh, and make sure you don't leave men behind accidentally as they keep going wandering off sometimes if you don't ensure they're all with you. 4. It's quite funny when your guys go all bravado into a room... "Ok, we're going in!", only to find it's another door back to where you came from, so they haven't achieved anything in particular. Of course, as you're directing them you know this, and they should too, if they had half a brain. Finally, I have to ask - the actor often doing the voice for the whole team (even though they're four separate men) sounds like that bloke who does those godawful voiceovers with the Territorial Army ads. Anyone know if it's him? Multiplayer is available for those who enjoy that sort of thing, but I'm a single-player kinda guy. Overall, SOCOM: US Tactical Strike is a game I wasn't expecting to enjoy particularly and ended up loving it so it's well worth a purchase, even if the AI does get frustrating sometimes.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008.