Review

by Joe Dopp a.k.a. "Dopper". Dec 23/2000.

 

Sweet Game! The graphics and sound are beautiful! Two guns up!
I really enjoy this type of game, it feels like a single player counter-strike type mission with various objectives accompanied by better graphics and sounds. This game has some real potential, however because Eidos pushed Interloop for a release date before Christmas the game is lacking many features that could have turned a good game into an amazing game. Hopefully they add some more patches, expansion packs or addons, otherwise a sequal would be wishfull. It is extremely fun to play, however once you've played through the game once or twice there's nothing new to keep your attention so you'll most likely put it on the shelf and want to try something new. The AI isn't the smartest, if you walk out of thier line of sight, sometimes they run right past you. You can shoot an enemy who's 5 feet away from another enemy, the one who lives doesn't even react to his buddy dying unless you run up to his line of sight or shoot him.

Cool movie at the starting, as well as a nice story dialog that loads between each mission.	This is your own personal little hacker chick who sends you mission orders!	A neat feature is how it auto toggles to 3rd person when climbing, and during special actions	Here's a shot of climbing over the fence at a non-barbed wire section of the facility.	You can hack the security systems to temporarilly disable the security cameras.

Graphics Engine & Sound
Some of the cool features are displayed above in the screenshots. As you can see the graphics are fairly impressive. The scenery just blew me away, I was amazed looking at the mountainous terrain. The engine is currently tagged "the RealScape system". It allows over 10 million square kilometers of terrain in memory by using an iterative fractal system. The engine is the grandson of the JSF engine - that was a flight sim that Innerloop released about 3 years ago. If the horizon looks as if it's 20 kilometers away, then it really is. There is also a "portal system" embedded within the RealScape system - this allows complex interiors in the form of buildings and underground complexes. The surfaces are treated like real world objects so if you were to shoot at a wooden surface the bullets would penetrate it. If you were to shoot at something with a metal surface, lets say a tank, then the bullets it would deflect off it. The sounds are very realistic sounding, in fact I did some research and it appears the Interloop team actually went out and got to test firing each included weapon in real life to familiarize themselves with the weapons. This makes taking out enemy soldiers fun for a while, but after doing it a few times and learning how they react the same each time, it reflects poorly on the replay value of the game. (which seems to be the case on most single player games today)

When you sack a guy (nether regions shots) they slowly sprawl up into a ball & die.	Here is a view of the front gate of a jail compound from the top of the mountain /w a glock.	This is the same view zoomed in all the way with the binoculars from the mountain top.	This is pretty sweet how you can slide down wires from one tower to another tower	Original compared to medipacks I've seen in other games, This is IGI's medipack.

Weapons
This game has some cool weapons. Some of my favourite weapons coming from Counter-Strike Half-Life mod. I love the desert eagle and AK-47. Another nifty little toy is the binoculars. You can use them to spot enemies easier since it highlights enemies in red and teammates in green. You can use the binoculars to zoom in on enemies that are standing still at extreme distances and without moving your crosshair fire a few shots on them to snipe from distances. Also this game has a unique way to regenerate health with special medikits you inject using a needle. I especially like the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle you get to use on the mission "GOD". *for more info on GOD mission see below*