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Dom Robinson reviews
Sony 
- Price: £24.99
- Players: 1 plus online
- Widescreen: Yes
Going through the jungles and urban badlands of Panama, what SOCOM: US Tactical Strikebasically 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 nota fan of this kind of game normally. However, the more I stuck with it, themore I became totally gripped and now I love it, even though there are a fewproblems I’ll list about the game below but any such problems are notinsurmountable.
In each mission, there are tasks to complete such as disabling vehicles,taking photos or retrieving sensitive information. However, in each case allyou’ll have to do is direct your men where they need to go and the requiredoption will appear making it easy to know what you have to do, while shootingbaddies, securing hostages and reviving your men along the way.
Most of the time while you walk about, your soldiers are fairly intelligent inthat they’ll try and hide quickly behind walls when under fire, rather thansit there taking a bullet-riddling time, although once in a while one willstick out without comprehending that he’s being cannon fodder so this does becomerather infuriating and as you’re being fired on and they can be patched uplater, I just let them take the hits since they can’t be bothered to dodge outof 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 theright control with this sort of game. Sometimes your men just start firing atthe 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 sometimesyou forget what it was left on so maybe that’s me. However, it does get confusingin the heat of battle, rather than hiding from the baddies, you can accidentallyset a marker to cause you to walk headlong into them.
Graphics and sound are fairly functional without being particularly outstandingin any way, but given that you’re mainly just directing your men about they doa mostly reasonably job. Occasionally there are camera angle issues which canbe a pain, including trying to turn around so you can ‘see’ a fallen colleagueto 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 oftenthough.
Some random irritations about the game:
- 1. The female narrator’s voice spends too long telling me what to do at thestart 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 grenadesleft. Why is she so automated, with lacking information? Does she have a sparejob 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 gotto cover quite a lot of ground again…
- 3. It’s bloody annoying when you have to find a way round somewhere justbecause 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 meantto be tough men who know what SAS stands for, not wimps who, like Ross Kemp’sappearance 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 upsaid, “Get back to work!” and off he ran 🙂
- 2. And even when you’re attending to a fallen colleague to get them backto health, he still says, “Our man needs a medic!” Er… duh! You’redoing it!
- 3. Highlighting your men in turn or together, before issuing commands to gosomewhere, made them look like something from a Ready Brek advert. Oh, and makesure you don’t leave men behind accidentally as they keep going wandering offsometimes 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’regoing in!”, only to find it’s another door back to where you came from, sothey haven’t achieved anything in particular. Of course, as you’re directingthem 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 thosegodawful 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 asingle-player kinda guy.
Overall, SOCOM: US Tactical Strike is a game I wasn’t expecting toenjoy particularly and ended up loving it so it’s well worth a purchase, evenif the AI does get frustrating sometimes.
GRAPHICS
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALLReview copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2008.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.