One thing that will certainly grab you about Project: Snowblind is its pace. From the word go, you are thrown into the action and expected to fend for yourself. Although you are presented with controls as needed, there is no formal training experience, like the start of Halo or Half-Life. Instead, helpful advice about controls is thrown in while you take on your first wave of enemies.
This sets you up for the storyline, set in Hong Kong in 2065. It involves an ordinary 'nobody'-type soldier signing up for a "super-soldier transformation" for an international army called the Liberty Coalition. Following surgery, he gains abilities that allow him to be part of the frontline in a war against a destructive regime. A military coup leaves him stranded in hostile territory and cut off from command with only a handful of men, and as ever, it's up to you play as this soldier to take out the enemy before their unleash their world-destroying weapon.
Although the story feeds in reasonable well, the levels themselves do suffer from being too linear. You are given small areas where you choose how you take out the barrages of enemies, but ultimately there is a feeling that you're being guided through by your team-mates down a precisely set path. To their credit, this is partly due to the abilities of these computer-controlled friends; they will dive, take cover, try to protect you, and above all, feel like your comrades rather than people you have to put up with.
Throughout it all, high-quantity action seems to be the order of the day. Arguably, this is what most first-person shooters consist of these days, but the well-paced flow of action combined with the sheer joy of squad-based battles against swarms of enemies put Project: Snowblind above most of the crowd. Weapons are on the whole fairly typical, with rapid-fire weapons, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher, but there is also the interesting addition of a Half-Life 2-style physics gun which is rather impressive in combat. On top of the weapons loadout are the vehicles on offer; tanks and mechs are in place to add variation, but unrealistic physics and sometimes awkward controls (particularly the mech) make them more a hindrance than a help.
That aside, the game does offer a well-rounded and enjoyable story mode. On top of this single player action is the multiplayer, available for 2 players over split-screen, and up to 16 over LAN or the internet. Here a range of modes have been included: Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are as you'd expect, with two different version of CTF also on offer. The other modes are Assault, Tactical Assault, Hunter and Quick Demolition - all unique to the game. In Assault each team has a Power Source, and both teams must attack and defend their power source, which has a limited amount of energy; the first to destroy their enemy's power source wins. Tactical Assault is an upgraded version of the previous mode, containing nodes you need to hack before you can take out the Power Sources. Considering the amount of work that needs to take place - hacking and defending nodes as well as your power source - Tactical Assault really lives up to its name, and can be the most fun when played in large groups online. In Hunter one person grabs a token and becomes invisible, and has to fight off attacks from all the other players. Only the hunter can score points, and on top of being invisible they have the advantage of access to all weapons. However, when they die, the token is dropped and available to all other players. With Quick Demolition there is a bomb in the middle of the map at the start. Each time rushes to grab the bomb, and is then able to take it to a choice of locations in the enemy's base to plant. Unlike the bomb-planting levels of Counter-Strike, when the bomb is disabled, it is able to be replanted with the timer resuming where it left off. This makes for a particularly fast and frantic game. Overall, it's a good mix of the expected classic with the new modes. The only downside to the voice-enabled online play is the lack of players. Although if you had online in the evenings you are likely to find competition, the relative unpopularity of the Europe-limited PS2 online service compared to the whole world on Xbox Live means that you aren't guaranteed to find opponents all of the time, as I discovered one Friday afternoon. Thankfully the game's popularity means you shouldn't wait too long for someone to join your game.
To complete the experience is a pretty impressive set of visuals. The game appears to be almost at the peak of what is possible on the PlayStation 2, and the fact that I didn't find it ugly after recent bouts of Halo 2 on the Xbox shows it's achievement.
Reviewed by: Matt Bailey.
From: All About Games.
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