single player review only -
The story takes place in the fictional country of Adjikstan, and it finishes in Adjikistan as the entire campaign stays in the same snowing, dull area unlike it's previous title (SOCOM 3 US Navy Seals). It starts with the opening mission - Winterblade - where a fellow fieteam are in a chopper as they rescue a hostage and soon after they are shot down by a rocket launcher and fall victim to an opperation fallen hawk. They are then all captured by Adjikstan forces and kept hostage. AS you go through all 16 missions completing objectives you will have to rescue the captured fireteam as Spectre - the captain - along with your three team mates - Jester, Simple, and Killjoy (divided into Able team and Bravo team)
You will have the ability to issue comands to your fireteam such as - Fire At will, move to, stealth to, overwatch, hold fire, intimidate, rifle butt, takedown, hold possition, and some other useful comands. But sometimes the AI seems rather like they never finished training, wait let me refrase that - it almost always, seems like they don't know common sense. Examples such as repeatadly getting stuck on walls, or unable to throw a grenade without it bouncing back off a nearby wall and it rebounding back at them and blowing themselves up, or when 3 metres away from an opponent in a close quarters combat fight and missing every time they fire a round. Sometimes (SOMETIMES) they can be rather uselful like sometimes (SOMETIME) they save you a few times with a nice but freakish head shot on an unseen hostille who s cloing in on your fireteams poisition. But all up, the AI is bad.
The game does have some good points, like its very large vocabulary of weapons and attchments. You are givin the option at the start of any mission to customize your armoury but you cannot go to crazy because eveything you add to your inventory adds to your total weight status, and, if you go over the average weight Spectre will be unable to move as fast and may be a bit laggy in his movements. You can also change your teamates armoury to give them an advantage in some of the firefights.
Moving on, there arn't really that many action packed fire fights as the game has more of a stealthy sort of gameplay opposite to Blacks sort of run 'n' gun game ethics. Although, the game now has new vechiles and weapons, but i think it is very lame that the campaign has hardly any vechile experiences. And, for the weaponry, you will have to go through the boring campaign a few times and do some extra self objectives to unlock the best weaponry and componments. You can hook up your psp with fireteam bravo 2 inserted in it to combine CA and FTB2 to ultimatelly change the experience on both games and complete crosstalk objectives.
But after buying this game and playing through the whole single player campaign i was rather umimpressed. The campaign just seems more like a choir (to unlock things)instead of something enjoyable. The campaign is rather short, and feels very old in a way because of the fact it is just missiom after mission, a rather cinematic approach may have lightened things up a bit. It would have been nice to have a longer and more exciting campaign mode, and when you use your items, it would have been good ifyour weight decreases, but it doesn't.
Overall, for those people stuck offline like me, I strongly tell you to rent this game before even considering to buy it because the heart of the game is online. CA is more of an expansion pack to SOCOM 3 then another title, as the SOCOM 4 heading is being reserved by Zipper Interactive for a next generation gaming experience, and hopefully a better gaming experience.