Global Agenda Review

In a future where resources are scant and an oppressive worldwide government endeavors to extend its controlling grip around the whole planet, there are those who resist. Banding together in disparate factions, elite soldiers use their diverse talents and quick reflexes to carve out their place in a world where the land you fight and die for is the only land you control. Powerful alliances emerge and leverage their gains to create weapons of war, elevating the scale of conflict and heightening the drama of battle. Or so Global Agenda would have you believe. Though there is hectic, satisfying combat to be found in this large-scale third-person shooter, the game is rarely as exciting as the premise purports. You must grind though hours and hours of dull, repetitive missions to level up to the point where you can be competitive in player-versus-player action. PVP skirmishes can be exciting and well matched, though they are just as often lopsided and frustrating. Joining an agency and fighting for hexes on the persistent world map will make you more invested in the action, but even the best matches struggle to justify the hours of grinding needed to find them. Global Agenda satisfies the minimum requirements for a solid class-based shooter, but it takes a long time to fully reveal itself and, even then, the results aren't particularly impressive.

You begin by choosing one of the four classes. Assault players wield chainguns and rocket launchers, making them powerful tanks when supported by medics. Recon specialists sneak about and snipe foes with long-range rifles, while robotics players can deploy turrets, drones, and stations to aid their allies or defeat foes. Gaining levels unlocks new weapons, gadgets, special abilities, and points that can be allocated toward three different skill trees. These trees allow you to specialize within your class so, for example, medics can develop more effective ways to poison enemies or just focus on healing allies that much better. Because there is no cost to reallocate your skill points, you are free to spec your character on a game-by-game basis if you so choose, selecting the skills that will suit your play style. There's some intriguing diversity among the classes that creates the possibility for some dynamic interplay, both cooperative and competitive. Developing different strategies to support your allies and more efficiently destroy enemies is neat, and seeing other players in action is likely to pique your interest in playing as other classes.

Unfortunately, it takes so long to fully level one character that your interest in trying other classes may shrink at the prospect of repeating that grind. There are two main types of combat: player versus environment and player versus player. The latter does not separate players based on rank, so jumping in as a low-level soldier is a great way to get steamrolled by players who have better characters and more knowledge of the game. Getting the hang of the basics in Global Agenda is easy, but it takes a while to master your role. Each player has a melee weapon, a jetpack, and a special ability that can be used to give his or her teammates a temporary boost. You also sport two primary devices (for example, weapons, healing gun, repair tool); each with an alternate fire mode (for example, aiming down the sights, improved healing). These devices, along with the jetpack, are fueled by your regenerating power pool. Finally, each player can equip three off-hand devices (for example, temporary buffs, turrets, mines) that operate on a cooldown period. During combat, you must keep an eye on your health and power pool while using your devices effectively. While the run-and-gun action is pretty straightforward, there is strategic subtlety to be found in which devices you choose and how you use them.

Jetpacks are handy for zipping over to objectives.

In order to access this strategic element, you need to level up. (The level cap is 50, though you unlock every device and skill point by level 30.) PVP is generally dominated by higher level players and getting roundly defeated doesn't offer much in the way of experience rewards, so your best choice for effective leveling is to run PVE missions with a team of three other people. These missions take place inside enemy facilities that range from mines to labs and back to mines again. Despite the fact that there are four tiers of PVE difficulty, there isn't a lot of environmental variety. It doesn't take long before you've seen all the maps and every corridor, warehouse, and rooftop looks familiar. The bland art design doesn't help matters much. Though there are a few nice flourishes (pools of molten rock and soldiers in breeding tanks), the austere futuristic setting is largely uninteresting, serving as little more than geometry for you to traverse and use as cover.

Though they may be dull, the environments themselves aren't your enemies. That role falls to the robots. Laser-wielding androids are the foot soldiers of Global Agenda; they are generally content to soak up your gunfire while shooting you unenthusiastically and occasionally fleeing. They are accompanied by deadlier rocket- and grenade-launching automatons, as well as elite soldiers that mimic the assault, recon, and medic classes. Each PVE mission is capped with a miniboss fight, though as you move up the difficulty tiers, minibosses start showing up in corridors, leaving the end-of-level fights to bigger, badder bosses. Even with these tougher foes, the enemy population is almost as repetitive as the level design. While they don't offer much in the way of excitement, these missions can be reasonably challenging, depending largely on how well your teammates fulfill their combat roles and support each other. Players are generally smart enough about what they should be doing, and the game supports voice and text chat should you feel the need to offer helpful suggestions.

The armor may be shiny, but it's the devices that makes the soldier.

Victory brings the inherent satisfaction of a job well done, but even this is dulled by the repetitive nature of these missions. On top of that, you don't gain much in the way of concrete rewards. You earn experience points, credits (Global Agenda's currency), and raw materials that can be sold or used in crafting. Neither comes in much quantity, however, forcing you to grind for hours on end to make any significant progress. Crafting requires the aforementioned materials, as well as blueprints, which can be purchased from a store in the hub city (or, rarely, earned in PVE missions). This allows you to construct personal upgrades for your soldier, but the improvements they offer (for example, +1% ranged damage) feel laughably small. Though you can stack a few of these to get a somewhat less-meager bonus, learning to make the good stuff requires that you craft hundreds of items yourself. You may be able to find someone to sell you premium items, but you can bet they are going to come with a premium price tag. Accumulating worthwhile crafting skills and upgrades is tough in Global Agenda's economy, where both credits and materials require you to slog through hours of repetition.