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IGI2 Review April 23, 2003 Tom Chick |
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Summary: This is Tommy. Tells people he was named after a gun, but I know he was really named after a famous 19th century ballet dancer. That explains why he's a bitter, bitter boy and founded Project GPI2ARRTASUTPJ: Give Project IGI2 A Really Rough Time And Subject Us To Project Jokes. Well, at least the ballet dancer theory explains why nobody wants to bunk with him at E3.
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Project FPS: First Person Sneaker
"I'm going in" is a line that should be spoken in any action movie. The hero says it, then he does it, then the bullets and bodies fly, and then the world gets saved. The Norwegian developers at Innerloop know this, although they explain that IGI really stands for the Institute for Geotactical Intelligence. Right. 2000's Project IGI: I'm Going In and now IGI 2: Covert Strike are attempts to model the action movie set pieces that follow after the hero says, "I'm going in". Unfortunately, the results are as clunky and forgettable as a fifth-rate action movie.
Oddly enough, IGI 2: Covert Strike tries to emphasize stealth over action; there's more "coverting" than "striking". The tag line should have been 'Be Vewy Vewy Qwiet', but BVVQ doesn't have the snappy brevity of IGI. As you play, a 'stealth meter' shows how visible or audible you are. If you crouch and move slowly, the meter is low. If you stand up and run, the meter rises. The idea is to keep the meter low and steer clear of enemies as you sneak around and accomplish your objectives. If you make it through the entire mission without being spotted, you're rewarded with a special ranking. That won’t be happening often.
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The biggest problem is that it's not intuitive. There's not much consistency in terms of when you're visible and when you're not. Games like Thief and Splinter Cell use light and darkness as clear indicators of where you can hide. No One Lives Forever 2 built hiding spots into the levels and designated them with an icon. But in IGI2, stealth is an under-the-hood equation that sometimes makes no sense. For instance, you can make it across a field surrounded by bad guys, all looking in your direction, during broad daylight, if you crawl along on your belly. You can't even do that in Tenchu, a supernatural sneaking game where you're a quasi-invisible ninja.
Project HTD: Hold the door!
An incident at the end of the first level makes it clear what kind of sneaking game this is going to be. After you've crept through the front gate of a mining installation, bellied across a field or two, opened a few noisy garage doors, and ridden a giant conveyer belt, you then have to go down a huge freight elevator shaft. The shaft is closed off by the sort of enormous blast doors they put in the Death Star to keep laser bolts from bouncing around too much. What's more, there’s a room full of soldiers nearby and two guards standing in front of the doors, although their backs are conveniently turned. How to get down there?
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Since I had a spare save slot left over, I saved the game to try opening the doors from my hiding place. Depending on how the guards reacted, I could just reload and try another approach. But they didn't react at all. The enormous two-ton doors screeched open over the course of about thirty seconds and these guys didn't even turn around. I stepped on the elevator, which was big enough to pass F-15s onto the deck of an aircraft carrier, and I started riding the rumbling platform down. They still didn't turn around. Okay, so it's going to be that kind of a sneaking game. Project ITE: Ignore the Elevator.
SIDEBAR: If you read Tom’s work often, you’ll notice this quirky humor of his (like the barrage of Project: jokes herein.) You should also notice his avid love for movies. I had to beat off his amorous advances with a stick after writing the front-page headline for Black Hawk Down
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Project BAI: Bad AI
Bad AI makes the sneaking somewhat easier, but it's still tedious. It's slow going and requires a lot of trial and error with a limited number of saves for each mission. If you're seen, IGI2 apparently toggles a global state in which all guards know your exact location. If, however, you slip away quickly enough, they'll half-heartedly run a few new routes to try to flush you out. They'll also mindlessly repeat the same sound bite in attempt to annoy you so much that you give yourself up. As the game progresses, the annoying sound bites change from Russian to Arabic to Chinese, which at least allows them to say "What was that?" or "Where'd that guy go?" or whatever it is they're saying with some international panache.
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What gives these guards a fighting chance, and what makes this a stealth game instead of a shooter, is the AI's uncanny aim. IGI 2’s bad guys graduated summa cum laude from The Red Storm School of Sniping for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon Terrorists, whereby they can score a headshot from 500 meters, with an Uzi, before you ever see them. Since there are no health kits (I found a Medical Syringe in only one of the game’s 19 levels), you’re not going to get very far if you play IGI 2 as a shooter. However, if you manage to set up an effective killing zone, you can lure most of the guards to their deaths, since they don't seem to think anything of a pile of dead bodies. Whether it's a heated gun battle or a routine patrol, they don't react to a heap of bleeding bodies stacked up like so much laundry. Project NTC: Nevermind the Corpses.
Project PGN: Plastic Giraffe Neck.
In addition to bad AI, there are a few helpful tools to keep you out of the enemy line of sight. You can look around and over obstacles by holding down the peek button and moving your mouse. Unlike other peeking interfaces that model carefully leaning to one side, IGI2 seems to model popping your head off, sticking it onto a long pole, and then thrusting the pole around a corner. Unfortunately, you can't rotate this view, so you have to pull the pole back in to twist your head, and then stick it back out to look in a new direction. It's not at all like peeking. It's more like an awkward freaky periscope. You're a superhero with a plastic giraffe neck that doesn't swivel.
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There's also a nifty thermal scope that lets you see through walls. Since you can shoot through many surfaces depending on the caliber of bullet you're firing, you can hide in a small shed and shoot guards through the walls when they come to investigate. You can call up a map view by opening your laptop, which gives you a real time overhead view, complete with the location and facing of all the guards. Since this is supposedly a satellite view, it only works on outdoor areas, but it lets you watch patrol patterns from a distance. Project IWC: Isn't Wireless Cool?
SIDEBAR: There are about twenty uses of the word Project in this article. More increase as I make Project jokes about Tom’s Project jokes. As of this writing, they’ve increased to 21.
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Project FMP: Forgot My Power Cord
Your laptop also gives you a limited number of saves for each mission, supposedly limited by battery power. This is a marked improvement over the original IGI, which didn't give you any saves during a level. Like the original game, IGI 2 takes place on some huge maps ranging across wide swaths of outdoor terrain. Both games have been built from the engine Innerloop created for Joint Strike Fighter (also known as -- no joke -- JSF), a flight sim that looked pretty sharp in its day even if it was short on gameplay. But whereas these sorts of outdoor environments were rare when the first Project IGI came out, they're hardly unique these days. Operation Flashpoint is probably the best example and Black Hawk Down is the most recent example. As was demonstrated in Unreal 2, even the Unreal engine can do this now.
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After working with it for so long (JSF is six years old), you'd think Innerloop would have worked more of the kinks out of their technology. Although it sometimes looks pretty sharp, there are still some problems. There's no easy way to distinguish between steep hills and death cliffs. There's still a weird breathing effect to the terrain as you move around. Water looks more like some glassy, milky substance instead of water, as if you were on a planet with rivers of mercury. Shadows are blocky effects with weird angles that occasionally punch through solid objects or float in odd places. Smoke trails behind rockets look like solid black worms.
There are scads of collision detection problems ranging from guns sticking through closed doors to multiple guards standing in the same place at the same time. The character animation system is stiff and awkward, particularly when you shoot someone or when the camera pulls back to show you climbing a ladder like some funky spider monkey. Moving while crouched or crawling feels more like driving a small slow RC car as you glide along behind a low-rider POV.
Project ZLT: Zip Line Tycoon
There are nevertheless impressive aspects of the technology. For instance, when you shoot some surfaces or objects, there are separate damage decals for entrance and exit bullet holes. The Libyan town and villa look good. Some of the snowy mountains of Russia have a nice ambience. The rocket pad at the end of the game, which is also one of the better multiplayer maps, is a great setting for a grand battle. Considering the scale, it's thrilling to ride a zip line from one end of the map to the other. There are a couple of scripted moments when helicopters arrive and a bunch of enemies disembark and fan out find you. Some of the level designs have a nice realistic feel; there are convincingly placed barracks for the guards and even bathrooms, with none of the gratuitous caches of weapons and ammo that you get in most action games. And the size of some of the levels really is impressive.
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But while you'd think an emphasis on stealth set in these large outdoor environments would afford a lot of freedom, IGI 2 isn't built to give you many choices. Almost all the single player levels have mandatory choke points, often requiring combat instead of stealth and often built around something inconsistent. For instance, chain link fences are curious impenetrable obstacles used to force you through certain areas. However, in one prison break level, there’s a conveniently cut opening. Another level opens with a cut scene in which your character handily scaled a chain link fence to infiltrate a dockyard. Hey, no fair! That ability certainly would have come in handy earlier.
Most of the missions play out like a to-do list of contrived tasks. Let's see, I have to download the security codes, turn off the generator that powers the radar, realign the satellite dish, get a loaf of bread at Safeway, pick up the kids after soccer practice, and then meet the helicopter at the evac point. These rarely feel like anything other than a way to force you to visit locations on the map. At one point, you have to hijack a helicopter from an airport to escape. But first, you have to pump gas into the fuel tanks and then load ammunition into the guns. David Jones, airfield gas station attendant, crew chief, super spy.
SIDEBAR: John Paul Jones is the founder of the US Navy and famous for his quote ‘I have not yet begun to fight!
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Project JDJ: Jones, David Jones
Your character, by the way, is David Jones. He's kind of a poor man's Sam Fisher who wears his commando outfit everywhere he goes. However, his English accent doesn't make him sound nearly as tough as Splinter Cell's Fisher, who has the benefit of Michael Ironside's voice. Jones trades lame one-liners with his bosses, who are so stingy that when they want him to blow up a bridge, they make him sneak into an enemy base to get the explosives and then ambush a bunch of guards to get the fuses and detonation timers.
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Jones' mission director is Anya, a spunky blonde who seems to have borrowed her sorority girl coif and tight belly shirt from Unreal 2's mission director. Anya unfurls for Jones a storyline about some sort of nanochips that have something to do with a mad Chinese general. Truth be told, I wasn't really paying attention because I was busy replaying the levels a hundred times. As the story progresses, you get to play a few timed missions, two instances of having everything but your knife taken away, three annoying escort missions, rail sequences where you shoot mounted guns, a pre-scripted capture, a few fail states that immediately end the mission if you're detected, and a couple of one-shot kills from guards with rocket launchers. The whole thing ends with one of the dopiest monster closets I've ever seen. You know monster closets from Doom, right? A secret door opens and a dozen bad guys come running out from some tiny 10-foot by 10-foot space where they've been closed in with nothing to do but wait for you to trigger the door so they can jump out at you.
Project INB: It’s No Battlefield 1942
IGI 2's potential saving grace is the multiplayer game, which offers five maps cobbled together from elements of the single player game. The hard-to-find v1.1 patch adds a sixth map made from unique assets. There is only one type of multiplayer game, which is built around a sequence of objectives with progressive spawn points. For instance, on the map based on the rocket launching pad, the attacking team has to pump fuel into the rocket, and then detach the gantry at the top of the tower, before finally getting into a control room bunker to actually launch it. As the team accomplishes each objective, they can choose from additional spawn points closer to the next set of objectives. Players are awarded more money with which to buy better guns based on kills and objectives accomplished. Although the size of the maps allows a lot of maneuvering, the objectives, which are clearly marked on a small radar map in the HUD, keep players from getting lost. The multiple spawn points, however, keep the action fluid.
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This is Innerloop's first attempt at multiplayer support, which might explain why there's a sixteen player limit on these TRIBES-sized maps that would have fared better with thirty people running around. Unfortunately, IGI 2's multiplayer games have none of the personality of Battlefield 1942, none of the variety of Black Hawk Down, and none of the razor-sharp realistic fidelity of Raven Shield. It's ultimately a middling feature. The number of players on the servers reflect this; it's only a few week's after the game's release and active servers are already hard to find.
SIDEBAR: With a name like Michael Ironside, you’d better sound like a badass…
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Pros
Multiplayer games.
Flexible, yet focused; encourages a variety of weapons and allows different approaches to objectives.
Scale.
Large wide-open outdoor areas with buildings, water, and foliage.
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Cons
Stealth.
The mechanics, which are inconsistent, contrived, and frustrating, don’t make enough sense to be gratifying.
Enemy AI.
The only real challenge is the uncanny accuracy that makes firefights an exercise in futility.
Single player missions.
Each mission is a laundry list of objectives that feel more like a guided field trip than a mission.
Multiplayer support.
Limited to sixteen players, but hard to find even that many on the servers.
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SIDEBAR: Project BTCOOTPDGFB3HL: Beat The Crap Out Of The Pizza Delivery Guy For Being 3 Hours Late is well under way at Jakub’s household.
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