Elite Forces: Navy SEALs (PC) - Guest Post

Ray gave me this ropey looking budget first person shooter as a present for 'being so awesome'.

Thanks, Ray.

This game uses the same game engine as Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza, the first FPS Friday game I played. I wonder if there's some rule that says that Lithtech 2 games aren't allowed a title screen. At least this game has the title on its main menu, unlike Nakatomi Plaza.

Enough of that, look at this! It's a screen of text!

A downed spy satellite heading for Iraq, a HALO jump, exciting stuff! Of course, we don't get to see any of this. No voices, no dramatic music. Not even stock still pictures.

First thing you see in the game is this:

I had a hard time figuring out what I was looking at for a while due to the lack of shadows or any kind of depth cues.

Equipment check: I have a knife, a SOCOM pistol and an MP5 with a silencer on it. Let's be smart and use that.

I knew there was going to be a guy around this corner, there's always a guy around every corner. Foolishly, I was standing up and still had auto-run on, so I ran into the open like a complete berk.

In preparing these posts, I write things down as I think of them while playing, often not bothering to pause the game. In the time it took me to write all the stuff I've mentioned up to now, he must have fired over a hundred rounds. He missed with all of them. I even had enough time to dance right up to his face, back to the start and carefully strafe around this rock to make it look like I was sneaking properly instead of idiotically bashing into walls. I know he's the first enemy and this is only Normal difficulty, but he could at least have hit me ONCE.

A few more completely featureless canyon corridors and I've found the entrance to something. Surprisingly, the guard hadn't noticed his friend's futile attempts at hitting me and was standing completely motionless. It takes a dozen bullets, but I finally manage to hit him. I really miss being able to aim down the sight.

Inside the secret door is a very dark cave just as featureless as the canyons outside. I've got an objective arrow telling me which way to go, but it only shows the overall direction so it's no use in this maze.

In a show of complete ineptitude not seen since Red Faction 2, two trained professionals fully intent on killing the other empty full magazines at point blank range and hit absolutely nothing. Hmm.

It's just struck me how disciplined these soldiers are, aiming aside. They don't yell or scream or make any kind of noise at all really. I assumed at first that the game's sound hadn't started correctly, as there's no sound whatsoever on the title screen, but there's a very quiet ambient air sound in proper stereo here. No music. I assume the music'll turn up when it's good and ready.

I've killed a half dozen men up to this point and not one of them has landed in any sort of realistic fashion. This guy is sort of sticking up diagonally out of the ground. Sometimes they die one way, then decide they didn't die right and spring up ten feet in the air and die in a completely different way as they sink back down into the ground.

This is the most detailed room I've found in the game so far. I overhear the soldiers down there grumbling amongst themselves, griping that they're stuck guarding some busted up piece of junk in the middle of nowhere. NO WAIT, they're completely silent.

I decide to make my presence known and shoot a few dozen bullets into the man closest to the tent. The rest of the men lose their balance and hurry to their feet in panic, searching the rock walls to find where the shots came from as the music bursts into life, enhancing the urgency of the situation and providing a practical indicator that I am, in fact, in deep crap. NO WAIT, that doesn't happen at all.

It takes two whole MP5 magazines to get the man near the tent to even flinch. With no small amount of effort, I manage to kill him and the two other soldiers don't even acknowledge it. The music is completely absent.

I guess... I'll just be going then? Jesus. So, my objective is to get to that large square entrance to the left there. I can't jump down due to falling damage. Twenty minutes of cave exploration follows.

I'd show screenshots of what I found, but they'd only waste your time. If you want to know what large, completely empty brown boxes look like, find a big cardboard box and stick it on your head. There's hardly any objects or any hint of definition anywhere in the game. Some rooms have a single token bed or crate in, but that's it.

The objective marker has disappeared; I've found the door! Hooray!

How do I get the damn thing to open? I head ALL THE WAY BACK to the start of the level and search every nook and cranny for any sort of switch. No dice. The game has screwed up at some point and this door now cannot be opened.

So, in frustration at having wasted my time installing the game and playing this far just to get stuck behind a glitchy door with not enough of the game played through to write a Super Adventure, I start jumping at the door, hammering the Use key and shooting randomly.

The game hears my pleas and teleports me to the other side of the door. Now I have to keep playing.

Fate can be awfully cruel at times.

This neat burned-up tank is an oasis of interest in a vast canyon desert corridor of absolutely bugger all.

I've taken to idly shooting and reloading my weapons just to have something to listen to.

I've reached some buildings! My eyes bleed in relief upon seeing a colour other than bland.

When I approached, a jeep sped out, quietly drove around in a circle for a bit and stopped. There was a gunner in the back, so I shot at him for a few years until he fell off and disappeared. The driver does not move. And there he sits to this day.

The base itself consists of a concrete slab, a jeep, a soldier, a dog and an immobile tank that likes to occasionally shoot right over my head.

I can't find it in my heart to shoot the poor, innocent, not badly animated dog. He eats me.

The objective indicator says I'm supposed to be underground, so I find a ladder and skedaddle down to the basement.

This pitch black cave is perhaps the best looking thing so far in the game. If you've only got one texture, make the most of it with lighting effects! Activating night vision here just makes everything green.

What you're seeing in this screenshot is me using one of the lesser-seen FPS tactics: using an unaware soldier as a human shield in a gunfight. He doesn't even notice when I lean around him and shoot back. Hmm.

Inside. A concrete box. Underground.

The game aims for a huge bland target and hits it with unwavering bland accuracy. (First time anything's hit anything so far.)

I'm down here trying to find that crashed spy satellite. Somewhere within the rectangles of grey lies a large desk with a mucky polygon on it. I activate it to retrieve the information and the mission is complete. HUZZAH!

Or rather, a block of C4 appears and a timer starts. I check my objectives. Nope, there was no way I could have anticipated that I was supposed be blowing up this building. Oh well, better start running through all the rooms like a maniac to find the sequence of switches that opens the exit. And then find the exit.

Thankfully, the game doesn't start throwing waves of soldiers at me from nowhere at this point. That would've been frustrating.

Yeah yeah, I'm sure Saddam wants a lot of things.

As I escape from the base, the game reaches the absolute nadir of detail. Solid colour sky. One texture each for wall, ground and sea. It's like I'm playing a first-person shooter version of Hunter. Without the vehicles, weapons, massive world or open-ended objectives.

My escape route leads to a beach at the bottom of a cliff face, with an evil helicopter blocking my path. The helicopter itself is reasonable, but it's lacking in animation frames for its rotors and its motion is jerky and uneven so it looks like an amateur stop-motion film. From the teeny tiny specks of black smoke occasionally rising from the ground in front of me, I can tell that it's trying to shoot me. Otherwise, it's COMPLETELY SILENT.

HELICOPTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO MAKE NOISE. HELICOPTERS WITH GUNS MAKE A LOT OF NOISE.

This escape down the cliff is a pain in the butt. There's two textures: there's the sand texture and the rock texture. If you walk on the sand texture, you're considered to be on the ground. If you walk on the rock texture, you're considered to be falling. If, say, you walk from the sand onto a slightly sloped piece of rock and back onto sand to take a more direct route down the cliff face due to the pressure of the time limit, you will suffer significant falling damage and most likely die.

And I die anyway, because I run out of time and that tiny block of C4 I left inside the base has enough power to destroy the universe. How foolish I was to assume it would only destroy the room, or perhaps the building.

I made my way down the beach, carefully avoiding all the rock textures and this is what awaited me. You don't activate this guy or get in the boat. He doesn't say anything, wave his hands or acknowledge me in any way. You reach this point, your controls stop working for a couple of seconds and then the screen just goes black.

Hey, this guy must be my team! That was bugging me, but I couldn't quite place why. I don't know much about Navy SEALs, but I think they usually work in teams! Sending one guy in is quite dangerous. The cover has three guys on it. Do I get a team to work with on the next level?

Sarajevo!

No team.

The night vision sort of does work on this level for finding my way around, not through any sort of post-processing amplification effect or the simple trick of placing a light source in the world when the night vision is enabled, but just because my monitor has a slightly exaggerated response to green.

This level is more visually complex and varied than the Iraq level, which is a very welcome change. Colours! And shapes! There's even ambient gunfire in the background!

I can't understand why some shooters begin with sand levels. Both Alpha Protocol and kill.switch start with sand levels and they're both absolutely awful to look at. Alpha Protocol's first level is a complete screw up from start to finish. There's guard towers everywhere and you'll have absolutely no idea how the stealth works or what your items do. I hate it. I almost stopped playing kill.switch due to how ugly its first level was, but it does get a lot better looking later on.

If you're playing the Super AiG 'Oh wow, now I'm in a sewer.' drinking game. Take a drink.

This sewer leads to the next level, which starts you in deep water outside another area of the town. If you stick around under the water, you'll lose health, which is fair enough. If you save the game underwater, or sometimes near water, the game will refuse to acknowledge that you ever left the water. I thought I could finally stop playing when my guy spontaneously started choking in mid-air no matter what I did. Even starting a new game resulted in my soldier slowly drowning in the middle of the desert.

Restarting the game fixed the problem.

Fate is still awfully cruel.

"Hey mecha-neko, if the enemies are so stupid, how did you get to 0% health?"

The enemies are stupid and they are inaccurate. Yet, the combined might of multiple enemies concealed in complete darkness is a formidable force. Every corridor has a number of crates in it, and behind every crate lies an invisible man. I can't lure them into traps in well-lit areas because it's near impossible to get their attention. They're just not interested. It's like an opposite Contract J.A.C.K.. There's a lot of those tanks lying around as well, and they're lethal in these narrow streets. I can't use 'em and I can't destroy 'em.

According to the mission briefing, there's city skirmishes between Bosnian rebels and some other guys. And here they are!

A squad of men spews out of a nearby alley, meets up with another squad coming out of the house. They shoot at each other for a minute before everyone falls over simultaneously and fades away. This sequence repeats with perfect precision, like some kind of unusually violent life-size cuckoo clock. And this is the only point in the game where this happens. Is this what passes for a cutscene in this game?

By now, I figured that, like Christmas Carnage, this game's insanity couldn't last forever. Breaking all the Super AiG rules, I type in the cheats and float off to find something worth looking at.

To my complete lack of surprise, giving myself infinite health and the ability to float through the walls hasn't detached me from the game at all. It's still just as fun to play, which I guess means I was at the absolute zero point of getting fun from the game itself.

This room's got some visual features to it. It's got angled beams and at least a dozen textures. Would I have ever thought that the game would stretch to such lengths after wandering about in that tank desert for years? Hell, no.

I feel kind of bad for playing bad games through on this site. Like Rex Blade, the only fun to be had in Navy SEALs is the uncertainty, anticipation and joy of discovery. Unlike Christmas Carnage and Nerves of Steel, which are genuinely fun to play, I'm robbing you of what little pleasure you might have ever gained by playing Navy SEALs.

I like to think I'm an optimist. I can state categorically that this game is unmitigated awfulness that should never be played by anyone. Still, I'm trying to be thorough enough so that you get to see what little good there is, so you don't have to experience the pain that goes along with it (if you were at all curious).

I don't even get the cursory meet-up with another SEAL before the screen glitches up at the exit and I'm thrown into the final mission: North Korea. I think the level modellers got better as they went through the game.

I'm rescuing downed pilots from prison and, you guessed it, escorting them to designated points. Except! The folks who made this game are so hopelessly inept, the condition for rescuing a prisoner is if the player makes it to the finish line intact. You can run up to the prisoner, activate them, and then leave them in their cell while you run off and do other things.

Perhaps the best escort mission ever!

If you wanted to be mega open-minded and over generous, you rationalise that these folks are soldiers too and they're more than capable of looking after themselves, like Gunter Hermann in Deus Ex. But they can't. If you leave them to their own devices, they just get shot. If they die, you die.

You call this a jungle?

Seriously?

It's like I'm walking through a Lego model, for Christ's sake!

Okay, there's some repeated buildings here. The same immobile tank that shoots above my head. Everybody has an AK. Everybody in the entire game's had an AK! I've barely had a chance to use anything else because I don't get ammo for it!

Fast forward!

THE END. OF THE GAME. THE ENTIRE GAME. FOUR MISSIONS. TEN LEVELS IN TOTAL. TINY LEVELS.

No music, no voices, no cutscenes, hardly any sound effects.

It's the computer game equivalent of a diagram. It's an abstraction. Everything that a first person shooter should have is in there, but there's only sufficient detail present to allow you to see what's going on.

Everything good about this game was bought along with the Lithtech engine: the controls, the menu and the fact that it loads and runs. Everything bad about this game is due to ValuSoft not putting anything on top of it. I wouldn't be surprised if that when you buy the Lithtech stuff, you get given a bunch of levels, weapons, models, textures and sound effects and a short example game showing how they can all go together. ValuSoft loaded up that project, put their own title screen on and called it a day. RPG Maker fans will know exactly what that looks like.

I'd probably have enjoyed this game more if it were even more abstracted. Get rid of the scenario altogether. You play as a cube walking around a maze of brightly coloured cubes shooting other cubes with your cube gun. At least that's hard to screw up.

I played this game for three hours, and that's two hours and fifty-nine minutes too long.

THANKS RAY.