Desktop Enhancements. Networking Software. Trending from CNET. Download Now. Developer's Description By Gathering. The storyline takes you to Europe, Africa, Burma, and other locations scattered across the globe, and puts you in missions that blend of action, strategy, and tactics. Full Specifications. What's new in version 1. Release November 7, Date Added February 10, Version 1. Operating Systems. Total Downloads 66, Downloads Last Week 8.
Report Software. Related Software. As for the next project, Petr is keeping schtum. Who knows? He certainly has enough on his plate steering the ship at Illusion, a company that now employs over people in five different offices, including two in neighbounng Slovakia.
Asked what it is about the game that makes him most proud to have been part of its development. Petr doesn't hesitate. It's the same basic premise: an elite unit of soldiers working behind enemy lines to disrupt the Nazi advance. It's the same style of gameplay: take control of different mission specialists to achieve distinct goals by operating as a team.
It's even got the same level of difficulty: bloody hard. Where it differs most obviously is that it uses a game engine similar to that of Rainbow Six, everyone's favourite team-based special forces sim. And you know what?
You'd be right. It's July and you're in command of a brand new military unit - the Special Air Service the manual has a pretty good potted history of the SAS and its early missions - designed to work covertly behind enemy lines. Illusion Softworks put you in the mood for all this right at the start with what has to be one of the most dramatic musical scores heard in a game since, well, Rainbow Six. Real Dirty Dozen stuff. There is one slight annoyance at the start though, namely the lack of any kind of training mission to ease you in.
This may be a personal gripe, but being thrown head first into the missions before you've had a chance to get adjusted to how the different gameplay elements work doesn't help with the difficulty level at all. At this point though, special mention must go to the manual. It's extremely detailed, especially the sections on combat tactics.
It covers pretty much every kind of situation you might find yourself in, from attacking hilltops to capturing enemy tanks, all in plenty of schematic detail.
The only downside, as was said earlier, is that you don't have anywhere to practise all this before the missions start. The only real complaint about the game is the difficulty settings. You will die. There was a last-minute decision by the developers to B include a savegame mid-mission. The first time you achieve an objective by careful planning and precise teamwork elicits such a feeling of delight that you damn well want to save it so as not to have to repeat the whole process when you inevitably get massacred at the next hurdle.
The producers boast that there are many ways to complete each mission, which in a sense is true. It's not an overwhelming sense of freedom though. Even though your routes from point A to point B may vary slightly from one attempt to the next, you always get the feeling that there's a certain path to follow to ensure a victorious outcome.
It's still up to you to find it though, and that's probably where the gameplay comes in. The odd thing about all this is that you don't actually care that it's so bloody difficult, because the game itself is so enjoyable to actually play. All the gameplay elements work pretty well, from the complexity of the planning screens to the levels of your soldiers' Al. Rainbow Six had a few major problems in this area, mainly your troops behaving like idiots at inappropriate times.
There's very little wrong with it. The team-based combat genre is really taking off right now, with four or five titles all about to hit us before the year's end. Highly recommended. Two of the surprise hits of last year, Commandos and Rainbow Six , are coming together. Hello, chaps," said Sergeant Whedon, arriving from his infiltration of a nearby warehouse. Look what I found. Blimey," said Lynch.
But who was going to get close enough to stick one up the Hun's backside? Or at least it is when you're not frothing with rage and frustration at a seemingly impossible assignment or a badly timed bug. OK, so you'll have to add in your own pedestrian bits of dialogue, but the between-mission cut-scenes give your soldiers enough of a Boy's Own feel to last you a good while. And yes, you read right, high difficulty and bugs are still present, though not as rampantly as in the original.
This sequel has been in the works for years, so it's a real shame that it's been released in a less than fully polished state: guns and characters floating, soldiers getting stuck in the scenery, suddenly not being able to shoot and even a crash or two.
Illusion is already hard at work on a patch which may already be out by the time you read this , but it's surely the publisher who's to blame. Why not wait till Christmas to release it, unless it's because Half-Life 2 had been delayed and they spotted a hole in the market? Who knows? It has the same attention to detail and the same gripping firefights, though it looks considerably better and, on some levels, nothing short of stunning.
Once again, you choose a squad of four from a large pool of soldiers, each with their own strength, endurance and skills in shooting, stealth, first aid and lock picking. A very nice touch, so simple yet rarely used by developers, is that you can rename your SAS members hence my crack team of film directors and novelists.
This, coupled with the way their stats improve after each mission, lets you get close to your team and feel their death as a real loss. And sometimes you will have to make sacrifices. Because most missions are so tough and because you only have one save slot which you can overwrite whenever you like , you may find that your 14th attempt is successful, but that your best medic is a bloody corpse. Not that you can afford to lose too many men. Your group of four has to last for the duration of each campaign before you can bring in new faces.
While you will die a lot and swear your lungs out more, even the most difficult situations can usually be solved by clever and tactical thinking. Illusion never resorts to making the enemies infallible or outrageously numbered. The one exception is a mission in which you have to cross the desert. There are planes flying above ready to shoot you down if you get out of your jeep, and halfway through the path from which you can't stray due to the numerous mines outside it you encounter a tank that chases you as you try to backtrack and blows you to hell.
Finding missiles and then managing to get close enough to fire at the tank without it seeing you first nowhere to hide in a desert or the planes mowing you down, is exasperating beyond words. And then one of my men would decide to waste a precious missile firing at a plane and I would have to start again. As you may have guessed, the Al is not without hitches. A lot of the time your team does exactly what you tell them to follow, attack, hold position, lay down covering fire etc , often sees and kills enemies before you know what's going on and even tells you when you're in their line of fire.
Other times they'll shoot when you've told them not to or walk when you want them to run. The enemy can be erratic too. Sometimes they act completely human, missing the target if startled, retreating and surrendering. Other times they fail to hear gunfire or can home in on your head through thick vegetation. No doubt some of these issues are bugs, and will hopefully be sorted soon. To help you cope with some of the harder missions, you can bring up a top-down 3D RTS display, where you can set waypoints, stance and speed.
It's sometimes hard to get them to do exactly what you had in mind though, and I would have preferred more options, like covering a particular area. Others will make more use of this screen than me. I preferred to scout ahead with my sniper and then bring the rest over when needed, only occasionally using the tactical display to outflank enemies. You can actually play through the whole game in Lone Wolf mode but, as you can imagine, the difficulty is multiplied.
It does add to the incredible variety on offer though. The environments are startlingly different, from the stark African dunes to dense Burmese jungles so, so much better than Vietcong's , from beautiful icebergs to awe-inspiring Austrian hills. These are so beautiful in fact, that the Austrian tourist board might want to use them for promotional purposes. Though they might want to edit out the bloodthirsty Nazis.
The gameplay is just as varied: stealth missions, full-on assaults, scuba-diving and even a great defend-the-oasis-fortress-in-the-desert level. And each requires a very different tactical approach. The attention to realism draws you in completely until one of those bugs comes along , with weight restrictions, scope drift, and the ability to shoot through canvas or wooden walls. You also get out of breath if you run too much.
As if I didn't get enough of that in real life. Donning a disguise is just as realistic: the uniform has to be taken from a surrendered soldier so there's no bulletholes or blood stains.
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