I put the disc in the Xbox, and let the game boot up. The opening intro has intense footage of the military unrest in Somalia, on which the game is based. There’s nothing but hype going on here. The music is exhilarating and I can’t wait to get started. Once the tutorial mission starts, and I get my first glimpse of the game, I immediately want to die. The game looks absolutely horrible. I can’t remember the last time I saw graphics as bad. The only thing that I think comes close is the very first release of Everquest for the PC.

The models and environment have little to no discerning geometry, textures are low resolution and in many places shoddily mapped onto the already scarce polygons. The lighting is crap. Everything is lit with environmental lighting like a bad VRML demo or some cheesy game design student’s final project. Anti-aliasing is nowhere to be found and the animation is the most brutal I’ve seen in years. Fingers are simple cylinders and textured with not much more than the color of skin. When you pull the pin on a grenade, your hand moves “near” the grenade, and then in surely three frames of animation, the pin pops off, appears in mid-air for a frame, and promptly disappears. The night vision effect is nothing to get excited over either, contrary to the in-game tutorial narrator who bids you to go into a building for a cool surprise. Surprise, you get a green headache.

The controls are pretty standard first person shooter fare, but their implementation is one of the worst I have experienced in a first person shooter, where incidentally, control is everything. First of all, the mechanics used for movement are glitch-prone. Trying to scale ladders or jump into waiting helicopters can be frustrating and often takes several attempts. In one case, I climbed a ladder, tried to look down and my gun collided with the ladder polygon. Since the engine thinks it’s impossible for my gun and the ladder to coexist, the only option is to move the wielder to a position where the gun no longer intersects with the ladder. In my case, this put me about a foot away from the ladder in mid-air, soon to fall to the ground amid a flurry of expletives.

These glitches aren’t where the control issues end. The fact that this game is designed for precision play with a mouse is one thing. In my opinion, FPS style games are always played better with a mouse and keyboard. Still, most on the console system, make wise use of the analog controller to allow for varying degrees of sensitivity. In this particular game, the analog stick is mostly dead in the middle and imprecise when you get to the edges. This combined with some of the “realism” features create a game where you are not usually in control of where your bullets go. Not that being in control of your bullets would help much when you can’t see your enemies except through a scope.

The single player missions are boring and monotonous. Really not worth the headaches and ridicule you will experience if anyone actually catches you playing this game. There are some missions that involve being driven around in humvees or flown around in UH60 blackhawk helicopters while you man machine guns, but the bad guys are sparse and the guns difficult to aim. The overall lack of realism in the graphics engine keeps you from experiencing anything but frustration that the mission won’t just end.

Everything I’ve heard about this game indicates that the single player is lame, but the game is redeemed in the online mode. I don’t see any such redemption. Sure the game runs with fifty people on a server. Sure Novalogic has good servers where you can connect quickly to several different types of games. Thank you, but I’ve seen so much more from massively multiplayer games, especially now on the verge of the release of the XBox 360 and later the PS3. I’ve grown to expect more. No amount of rationalization or justification is going to convince me that this game is worth playing. The mere fact that this game was released the same year as Call of Duty annihilates any and all exemptions it could possibly gain from being an older game. Even by the standards back then it lacked accolades. For the game to be released now amidst a store full of next generation titles on the cusp of yet another generation of consoles is laughable. For them to be charging 49.99 is just plain offensive.