A mediocre sci-fi entry...
A Special Forces team is on a top-secret mission to a planet far, far away. Only five people are in the know, and their objective is to take down an evil corporation that is manufacturing bio-enhancements. No, this isn’t the latest Sci-Fi original picture, it’s SpecForce, a game that takes the first person shooter genre and gives it a giant kick back into history.
In this game, the sequel to 2003’s Chrome, you reprise your role as Bolt Logan. Instead of fighting as an elite mercenary hired by corporations, you’re operating as a special forces soldier for a governing body who is investigating those same evil corporations. Gone are the planet-to-planet missions across a wide array of environments and atmospheres. Gone is the ability to win new implants through successful completion of missions. Gone is just about all the fun that the original game had. All these elements that Chrome successfully integrated into its gameplay have been substituted by mediocre replacements.
As a member of the SpecForce military, it’s your job to investigate the planet of Estrella. The LoreGen Corporation has been working with performance enhancing drugs and you’re sent in to investigate, and terminate, the illegal experiments. Things go awry and your transport ship, and everyone who knew about your mission, go up in flames. This leaves you and a fellow SpecForce operative alone on a hostile planet with little more than an assault rifle and a few clips between the two of you. Piece of cake, right? The proceeding adventure sees you travel across the planet to sabotage LoreGen and lead a campaign of guerilla warfare with the help of the local resistance. How a resistance movement started on a terraform planet discovered, created, governed, and regulated by an evil corporation is a mystery. I hate to yell plot hole, but it’s hard to think that the corporation missed rebellious dissident on the job application. Shooters are not traditionally known for their gripping storylines, but with SpecForce it’s just one of many problems.
The game tries to alleviate some of the issues with the inclusion of a portion of the bio-enhancements from the original game. Four in total, you’ll have access to power shields, invisible camouflage, speed enhancements, and a neural-boosting unit, which essentially slows down time for a Max Payne bullet time effect. You’ll find that these combat supplements, used by your suits battery power, not only help you in combat, but become the reigning factor of it. Because enemies constantly drop batteries that can recharge your system, you’ll always have the abilities at your disposal. You may find yourself running around, and upon engagement of the enemy, activating your neural enhancement to take them out while sustaining a minimum of damage. Repeat ad-infinitum and you have SpecForce’s combat nailed down.
The game doesn’t force you down this route. Indeed, it can be countered by upping the difficulty which will result in reduced supplies from fallen enemies and hyper-accurate enemy fire. It’s the accuracy alone that presents the majority of challenge when dealing with the AI. It’s not clumsy, but it’s not exactly smart either. Enemy soldiers will seek cover every now and then but most of the time they’ll charge you or simply get on one knee and fire. A lot of the damage you take will come from prepared defenders when you enter rooms, or when jungle cover conceals enemies. It doesn’t help that their camouflage blends seamlessly with the trees and underbrush. Sometimes spotting enemies is impossible without the assistance of your targeting implant.
Then again, who needs accuracy when you’re in a giant walking mech? One of the better points of SpecForce is the game’s inclusion of vehicles. There’s a small selection of land-based vehicles, bi-ped mechs, and aircraft. Zoom around the jungle base in a quick hover-bike scout or take on an entire army with a fully-armed battle mech featuring a vulcan cannon and rockets. The vehicle sequences help break up the typical smattering of objectives which include simple combat from point-a to point-b, strategic planting of bombs, and computer hacking.
Throughout all your objectives you’ll need to survive, and that means raiding armories and corpses alike for the necessary hardware. You’ll find several variants of assault rifles, a pistol, submachine gun, powerful single-shot rifles, rocket launcher, and a few grenades to play with. Both the weapons themselves and the ammo can be taken from storage units and bodies. Since SpecForce uses an inventory system similar to that of Deus Ex, so you’ll have to select your weapons wisely. Each box of ammo, health kit, and individual weapon takes up space. Most of the time you can carry two weapons, a decent amount of ammo, and sufficient health kits and battery packs to last you a while. Some ammunition isn’t as plentiful, so it’s important to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each weapon so you don’t rely too much on one gun. Sadly, grenades aren’t as exciting as you’d probably like them to be. The throwing physics looks very odd, and the explosions are lackluster, but that’s due to the extremely dated engine.
SpecForce looks like the same game we saw two years ago in Chrome, with only a few minor tweaks here and there. Terrain textures are bland and repetitive, and the same goes for the buildings. You’ll realize this after you walk into the third of many enemy bunkers and realize it’s the same layout of computer screens and chairs all over again. To ultimately realize the horror of the graphics, you need only look at the effects for the game’s electricity, which look less like energy and more like turquoise snakes writhing in pain around the floor. After seeing the graphics in action, I feel their pain.
The sound isn’t much better. The main character makes you think of a novel on tape, and even that may be an insult to recorded novels. There’s absolutely no emotion in the voice at all. Supporting characters fair a little better and actually get excited and express advanced emotions like fear and frustration. Sound effects are alright, with the exception of the shotgun. You’ll see the pumping animation a good 2-3 seconds before you actually hear it.
SpecForce does feature a multiplayer, but with so much that’s already on the market there’s really no reason to check it out. When we tried, we found six servers with a grand total of two players. Apparently those two guys didn’t get the memo.
SpecForce isn’t a terrible game, but it isn’t terribly good either. It’s a competent shooter, but the absence of everything that made its predecessor interesting is mysteriously gone. The graphics are virtually the same and the gameplay has been taken down a notch. The two years it took for Techland to release this game is about 18 months too long. Hardcore shooter and sci-fi fans may find something interesting here, but it really can’t compete with the rest of the market.