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The Sum of All Fears

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Preview
Article Date: May 21, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: The Sum of All Fears
Category: Squad-based Tactical Shooter
Developer: Redstorm
Publisher: Ubi Soft
Release Date: Released (May 2002)
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Mix together a Clancy novel, its movie version, Red Storm, and the Ghost Recon engine: and you get the computer game, The Sum of All Fears (SOAF). We got our paws on a late beta (so late that the CD arrived the same day Ubi Soft announced the game was going gold). I’m not certain that the game actually follows the book or the movie terribly closely, but it does provide a series of eleven operations that follow after somebody blows up the Super Bowl. Inevitably, it turns out that the bombing wasn’t conducted by football hooligans, let alone some sort of British group dedicated to eradicating “the American Nancy-boy sport” in favor of real football, but by a world-spanning terrorist group with darker ends in sight for whom football is, in the end, only a game. Though the game uses the Ghost Recon engine, which seemed tuned for outdoors environments, SOAF takes the gameplay mostly indoors, and also attempts to make the series more accessible to a wide audience while taking them to various locations in the USA, Southern Africa, Lebanon, and Austria.

An elegant library, with bullets.

The indoors part of the move works quite well, and will seem very familiar to fans of the Rainbow 6 series. The eleven missions concentrate on attacking various building complexes, from dockyard warehouses to an abandoned prison to elegant offices. Unsurprisingly, all of these look the part and provide a series of distinctly different locations to fight in. The nature of the missions varies somewhat, including some hostage rescues and rather more all-out assaults. A few missions require some degree of stealth, as well, though the stealth turns out to be best served by killing the enemy quickly with silenced weapons, not much like the sneaky-peeky sorts of missions found in the original Rainbow 6. These aspects of the gameplay, though, will seem quite familiar to players. Line up on the door, bust it in, shoot the baddies. You’ve done it before, but it’s still good fun.

Sneaking through a guarded dockside warehouse....

The differences are somewhat subtle, and they are all geared to ensure that the player can get to the action quicker and with less thought. For starters, no longer need you worry about skills or skill points: they are gone. You are the leader of the Gold Team, a three-person element on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. The names of these agents are assigned randomly at the beginning, and can’t be changed by you. You can choose the team’s overall kit package, but cannot choose kits individually for your agents as in Ghost Recon, let alone choose which bits of gear to put in which slots as in Rainbow 6. If you complete the bonus objectives on missions, you do get access to extra varieties of kit, some of which are quite handy. Some, by contrast, are not; the assault shotgun is billed as great for room-clearing, but doesn’t actually have the takedown power of most of the other weapons.

Choosing your kit: the 5.7mm SMG is actually quite nice.

There is also no pre-planning to speak of, just as in Ghost Recon. Instead, you have the option of having the game display the HQ Plan on the in-game mini-map. This provides a white line that will lead you to your next objective. In fact, if you haven’t done the mission already, you may well need the help, even when it feels like being led by the nose. The beta’s briefings were incomplete, so that white line was often the only way I had any real idea of what I was meant to do, and in the missions where it failed, things rapidly devolved into a violent Easter Egg hunt. Again, this system appears to be in place to ensure that punters who pick the game up on the strength of the movie tie-in can rapidly get into the action.

Take the docos and run!

One nice twist, however, is the inclusion of things to “use” in the game worlds, usually documents you have to pick up. While not much different from the usual “take this room” objective, “take this item” feels more natural. In addition, the maps had few or no “gotchas” of the sort that cropped up in Ghost Recon, where you cannot move over apparently trivial obstacles. Also, your three-person team is not alone. There may be up to three other friendly three-agent teams in the mission, assaulting the objective in accordance with the HQ plan and moving to stay coordinated with you. This works remarkably well in providing the feel of being part of a larger operation.

Discuss your creative differences with the team - storm Red Storm's offices!

The training mission will be pretty familiar to players of Ghost Recon, since it’s a modified version of the same mission. Providing more variety, however, are the single missions. Many of the locations sound standard, such as an Athlete Village and a Parking Garage. Two stand out, however: an Art Gallery and the Red Storm Entertainment offices. Both are well-decorated, eye-catching spaces with lots of odd lines of sight that should keep players happy. A plethora of multiplayer options should also be available, and the whole package is set to retail at $30, which is a reasonable number of dollars per mission in terms of recent offerings in the line (2.7, as opposed to 3.3 for Ghost Recon). We’ll have a full review of the release edition in a couple of weeks.



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