Article Type: Review
Article Date: June 24, 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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Most reviews look to answer the question, “is this a good game?” We can dispense with that one right now: The Sum of All Fears (SOAF), taken by itself, is a great game. Given that it’s based on the Ghost Recon engine and sports Rainbow 6-style gameplay from the team that pioneered the genre of tactical sims, that’s no surprise. Instead, we need to ask a rather more complex question: when taken in context instead of in isolation, is the game worth your money?
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Why does it always rain on exercises?  |
If you are an old hand with Red Storm’s tactical sims, you’ll find many elements of SOAF quite familiar, and some new elements quite jarring. SOAF puts you in the role of an agent on the Gold Element of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. So far, so normal—but you don’t actually get any choice about who is on the team. SOAF simply assigns three agents to the team and that’s that, with no worries about the agent’s stats to confuse the issue. This is the first of the jarring changes, and like the other changes, it exists to make the game more accessible to newcomers.
You’ll get used to it soon enough, but it does pass up on an opportunity for customization, to the extent of choosing the lead agent’s name and gender, that would probably help immersion. Instead, name and gender are chosen at random. If you can imagine the negative reaction of many guys on discovering that their persona turns out to be female, you’ll also understand why many women are turned off by discovering that they have to play as some guy.
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| The Ahtlete's Village is one of the multiplayer/quick mission maps |
The preplanning of prior Rainbow 6 games is completely gone. Using an interface similar to that in Ghost Recon, you get a briefing that details your mission objectives, complete with pretty pictures. However, the detailed kit selection of Rainbow 6 and the package-based kit selection of Ghost Recon has been downgraded into whole-team kit package selection in SOAF.
Completing the extra objectives on missions gains you access to extra kit packages. This does keep things simple, but will irritate you if you wanted to mix-n-match your weapons in different ways. On the bright side, if you need lock picks or explosive charges, you automatically carry them on the mission.
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| Some early-game kit options |
If you selected “Show HQ Plan” in the options (and it’s ON by default), then the minimap in the game will show a white line that leads you by the nose through the game’s objectives. On the Easy level, the game enables heartbeat coverage of the entire map, and also turns on auto-targeting. At this level, you have a game which feels as if it is a rail shooter: go through this door, turn left, target cursor snaps to terrorist’s head, fire, lather, rinse, repeat.
This probably does make the game more accessible to newbie players, and all of these options can be turned off for a harder game. I do suggest you leave the HQ plan on, however, until you know a given mission well. Without its guidance, you may have a difficult time figuring out where you are meant to go and may spend quite a bit of time wandering around aimlessly.
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| Biazrre but true: nobody bleeds in The Sum of All Fears |
The game plays out much as you’d expect. The engine is beautiful on a high-end graphics card, and all the locations look like what they are supposed to be. (The most impressive, in fact, aren’t in the main mission set but in the multiplayer maps: the art museum and Red Storm’s offices are both great maps.) You lead your team through the missions, kicking in doors and shooting terrorists.
The new wrinkles include an expanded use of grabbing documents or disabling electronics as mission objectives. In addition, you can give a few on-the-fly orders to your team, such as “open this door” or “flashbang that room”. The implementation of these is clumsy, however, requiring the player to hit Control and then select the command with the mouse. Hopefully the Quick Orders Interface planned for Raven Shield will follow the excellent SWAT3 model instead!
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Today's Episode of
Storming Stately Homes
features this lovely tropical mansion... |
SOAF’s campaign lasts all of eleven missions, and many of you could finish the game in an evening with the difficulty level set low. Fortunately, the difficulty can be increased a great deal, with the enemies being deadly shots at higher levels, and the option exists to disable some or all of the hand-holding elements. Then the game will be every bit as hard as you’d expect. Even so, eleven missions feels short.
You can play the single and multiplayer maps in single player quick missions, along with the training mission map. The multiplayer mode includes a new style, Cat and Mouse, in which one player is hunted by all the others, and only the hunted player gets points for kills. It’s true that the game is about 60 cents cheaper per mission than Ghost Recon, yet it feels skimpy.
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| Storm Red Storm! |
Will punters who buy the game on the basis of the movie be pleased? It’s hard to say. Others claim that the game bears only a tangential relationship to the book and the movie, but since I have neither seen the movie, nor could I bring myself to slog through the book, I can neither confirm nor deny this. SOAF should allow newbie players to have the fun of playing as elite soldiers, especially with the difficulty options set easy. Unlike so many game adaptations of movies, SOAF is not a steaming pile on your lawn, and it may well entice numerous punters to try other similar titles.
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| The art museum is a visual treat |
However, most COMBATSIM.COM readers aren’t in the punter category. It’s likely you own many of the previous tactical sims Red Storm put out. There’s nothing wrong with SOAF. As stated earlier, taken by itself it’s a great game. If it cost less, it would be easy to recommend. As it stands, however, it brings little that’s new to the field for its price tag.
On the other hand, did you spend most of Ghost Recon wishing it took place indoors? Do you adore the book or movie The Sum of All Fears and simply must have anything based on them? Do you have loads of extra cash and want to have the Complete Collection of Red Storm tactical sims? Perhaps most usefully, do you have a friend who needs to be introduced to tactical sims? Then run out and get SOAF now, and do so in the knowledge that you’re buying quality entertainment. If you have to mind your budget, however, you may want to wait until the price drops.
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