Shadow Ops: Red Mercury Updated Hands-On

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is an upcoming military-themed first-person shooter for the Xbox (and later for the PC) from Atari and developer Zombie Studios. Zombie, whose back catalog has focused primarily on by-the-book, realistic military games, has decided to go in a more-visceral direction with Shadow Ops, styling it after such big-screen tours de force as Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan. The game was finished recently and should be showing up on store shelves soon. We took the latest opportunity to sit down with a near-final version of the game to see how it's shaped up in the last few months of development.

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury places you in the role of Capt. Frank Hayden, a tough-as-nails officer tasked with tracking and securing red mercury, a mysterious nuclear substance said to function in nuclear weapons and believed by many to be a hoax. (In what can only have been seen by Atari as a fortuitous bit of free marketing, the Associated Press reported in mid-May that two men in the Ukraine were arrested for possession of a substance that was, in fact, red mercury.) In the game, you'll travel to many diverse locations around the world as you tail the bad guys and try to stop red mercury's use as a weapon. The missions are punctuated by cutscenes that advance the storyline, and we noted that even in the first few missions, there were a fair number of plot twists and unexplained events that should make the story pretty interesting later on.

The missions in Shadow Ops are directed by scripted action sequences involving your squadmates (which can be fast-moving and intense), in addition to mission objectives that you'll acquire dynamically as you move through each level. As in most first-person shooters, these objectives generally boil down to having you move from point A to point B, although the things you'll do once you reach these endpoints vary pretty nicely. Some of your goals include finding wounded soldiers who are trapped behind enemy lines; covering for an ally so he can sneak toward and destroy a tank with explosives; and investigating an airplane crash site, which culminates in a tense enemy ambush.

Shadow Ops focuses purely on run-and-gun combat of the not-quite-realistic arcade variety. Most missions will bless you with a capable weapons loadout that features an assault rifle, a pistol, and a sniper rifle, each of which is used based on the situation at hand. You can zoom in with any weapon by holding the L trigger, which gives you a greater degree of precision when aiming at faraway enemies. While zoomed in, you'll be able to lean around corners to pick enemies off before they can get shots off at you, which is an important skill to master, especially since your foes are pretty quick at trying to pick you off.

There are immediately noticeable differences between the game's difficulty levels, too. The easiest mode, for instance, will give you an indicator on your HUD showing the direction and distance to your next objective. However, you won't have this aid on harder difficulties. The enemies also become a lot more resilient between difficulty levels--on the easy mode, you can drop foes in a single shot, but on higher levels you'll have to do a little more damage to neutralize them. Overall, it seems like the highest difficulty levels will offer extremely tough challenges based on our time with the game.

We also got to try out Shadow Ops' split-screen cooperative mode for the first time, which lets you play through a series of maps that aren't found anywhere else in the game. Most of these missions aren't available at the outset, so you'll have to unlock the later ones by completing what's initially available. The co-op gameplay isn't radically different from what you'll find in the single-player campaign, aside from the fact that you'll have some much-needed backup in tight spots. These levels will have you and a friend shooting your ways through warehouses, jungles, or some other settings as you both move toward your objectives so that you can complete your missions.

The look of Shadow Ops hasn't changed much since the last time we saw it, which is to say that it's still looking good. The game uses the Xbox version of the Unreal engine to impressive effect, since it re-creates war-torn environments with a lot of nice set pieces--like damaged buildings, for example--to enhance the gritty atmosphere of the gameworld. Of note is the game's rag-doll physics system, which, quite frankly, is among the better implementations of this technology that we've seen. Many games' characters tend to flop around like marionettes when they die, but, at least from what we've seen so far, those in Shadow Ops fall as if they have some real weight to them. As a result, you'll often see enemies hanging over railings or plunging off of ledges to then realistically land in heaps when you take them out.

The game's audio has come together pretty nicely too, with a lot of realistic weapon and explosion sound effects (courtesy of Hollywood sound effects house Soundelux) and a lot of yelling from your teammates, which combines to create some particularly intense combat sequences. Shadow Ops makes full use of the Xbox's 5.1 surround sound hardware, which ought to enhance the immersion factor considerably for anyone equipped with a good home theater system. The game's professionally composed orchestral score kicks in dynamically as you play to help add an emotional backdrop to the action, too.

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is shaping up to be a solid FPS experience for Xbox-owning fans of the genre, with a lengthy single-player campaign that clocks in at around 25 missions, plus the full complement of Xbox Live features, including capture-the-flag and VIP escort modes. Anyone looking to save the world with a rifle in hand should give it a look when it hits shelves in mid-June. In the meantime, you can check out our previous coverage of the game. Look for more on Shadow Ops soon.