Do we take prisoners today, Sir? Yes, we do!
The game offers a variety of game modes, including a 14 Mission campaign, the obligatory Ad-Hoc mode and a formidable Infrastructure mode.
The single player missions offers a good variety of different urban and rural landscapes, different map sizes and changing challenges: find intel, free hostages, capture enemies, sabotage, defuse bombs on airports, abandoned villages and factories. For completing main and side objectives you earn command equity (CE) points, which can be spent for weapons, upgrades and equipment. Before starting a mission you choose one out of 3 comrades with different skills to go with you through the missions. Your can order your fellow comrade to perform a number of actions like to open doors, frag or flash rooms, to defuse and of course do the fire support. Team communication will be evaluated as well by the end of a mission, so you better hand out some orders to prove your leadership qualities. Besides the CE points you earn Local Influence (LE) points for securing hostages or capturing enemies. Capturing enemies can be fun if you carry a beanbag gun and shoot them 2 or 3 times to make them surrender. Making prisoners is being rewarded, and as your local influence is getting better and better, new black market weapons and infos are getting available. The controls are the most intuitive and easy to grasp for a tactical shooter on the PSP I’ve seen yet, the tactical command system is implemented very well. Weapons can be switched from single to burst or if equipped with a scope you can zoom in via the directional pad. That works quite well. In third person view you can easily lock onto a target, once it is in range. All weapons have a brief intro and tech specs available, so you can make a decision upon facts and features.
The missions are non-linear, you can go for the objectives as you like, you can even drop secondary objectives and the bonus objectives, if you are in a hurry. Once completed a mission, the map remains available and you can play through it again with a variety of changing objectives. That gives you the opportunity to practise with new weapons, tactics and try the next difficulty. Visuals are okay, not quite cutting edge, but adding the atmosphere and weather effects to the core graphics it’s fine. Sound is okay for voice acting and great for weapons. Online gaming is the cream on top of a decent game. You easily find a large variety of known games with up to 16 players. There are always a couple matches in progress and you’ll easily find something for your taste.
For the next sequel I'd like to see a better response of enemy AI to nearby shot comrades. Sometimes you have a bunch of 3 enemies walking around, you snipe one and the two remaining don't even react. I'd like them to respond in some appropriate way. In buildings they go after you if they spot you, but they could be more aggressive, throw frags or sort of. Fortunately your human counterparts do so when fighting online! All in all a very good game with so much replay value.