A half way decent game that many overlook & shun (contains spoilers)
At it's core, Without Warning is a basic third person shooter - you run around shooting terrorists from a "behind the back" camera angle, throwing grenades, taking cover, etc. Every now and then youll be forced to manually disarm a bomb by using a wire clippers or hitting a series of buttons in sequence, or picking locks on doors manually.
Speaking of shooting, something really annoyed me about this game. Its the fact that you don't collect any weapons. What you start off with, be it an M4 assault rifle or a mere handgun, is all you get and when you kill off enemies you get ammo for that gun. In otherwords, you only get one weapon per character... that is VERY lame in a shooting game.
Interestingly, you play as every character and will see the entire game through each characters perspectives. Like in WinBack 2, what you do with one character may effect another character somewhere down the line. Oddly though, this sort of works against the game overall - by this I mean you will probably be turned off having to go through a stage 5 times with all 5 different characters.. it gets repetitive and well, sorta lame.
It's not all bad though. The game is pretty fast paced with alot of ducking and shooting, blowing stuff up, and basically speaking - alot of killing. Without Warning is actuallly a pretty violent & realistic game now that I think about it.. more than once you will see hostages being executed by terrorists because America isn't meeting their demands. Although the game isn't very bloody - which was boo - the outrages acts of violence and anger can easily draw you in. In fact in the very beginning of the game you will witness Kyle Rivers' platoon being destroyed in a fashion only a video game could recreate legally.
The graphics weren't as bad as everyone, including Gamespot, made them out to be. Sure the characters lips don't move when they talk, which if you think about it, is actually standard in todays games but so what? The characters looking pretty detailed, the enviroments look real big and actually look like a chemical plant..or rather what you would expect a chemical plant to look like. Guns look good, explosions look awesome and satisfying. Each character, including the Army troops, all have a unique personality and style to them which was defenitley a plus.
The music was boring and dull, I will be brutally honesty with you, but the voice acting and sound effects were right on the money. Whoever did the voices relaly put effort and time into it, and gave everyone personality. For instance when a character gets surrounded and begins cursing, the way the actor did it relaly makes you understand the fear, anger, and anguish of that particular character. The guns sound great, and the explosions sound just as awesome as the game Black. Two thumbs up if the music was better.
Without Warning is a decently long game on an overview with about 30 or something missions including each character. However, some of those missions only require you to run from one end to the other while shooting which could last maybe 2-5 minutes..so I guess you would have to be the true judge of that.
To sum it up, I really recommend you play this game - not own - but give it a try if you like shooting or blowing stuff up. The story is pretty shallow, yes, but with the amount of heart racing action and violence, it wil ldefinitley give you a few hours of really fun gaming.