Every kid dreams of the ultimate playground: a big space in which everything looks cool, sounds cool, and has cool stuff to do. SegaSoft seems to have taken that very simple formula and applied it to its two-year work in progress, a mission-based action-adventure title called Vigilance. Using the rookie AnyWorld 3D engine, the game's visuals are dangerously close to being photo-realistic on a standard video card, the lighting effects are more than just good visuals in that they're incorporated into the gameplay, and multiplayer means collaboration, not just blasting away the competition.

Positioned as yet another shameless millenium doomsday plot, the storyline is such that you are part of an antiterrorist organization called SION - the Special Intelligence Operations Network - designed to put a stop to the worldwide eruption of terrorist activities taking place at the end of the 20th Century. SION agents are a conglomeration of operatives from the international intelligence community, brought together based on the skills each has to bring to the group as a whole. In order to optimize the activities of SION, each agent's skill set is unique, creating a core group in which each person is equally as important as the next. For example, the group may include an operative skilled in security systems, another in demolition, another in marksmanship, another in medicine, and so on. In single-player mode, for example, you have eight fully articulated characters to choose from, each with a different skill set and knowledge base. But all talent aside, SION's best isn't good enough, and the terrorism continues. Alluding to, perhaps, a conspiracy or act of connivance you and your team must uncover in order to solve the game.