Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror

Pros • Hectic, yet sometimes fun, missions. • It's not full-priced. • Good looking levels.	Cons • Movement animations look a bit jerky. • At times poorly paced. Can be an exercise in frustration. • No team orders available in single player.
Bottom Line Not the worst game I've played, but the entire endeavor has that "let's-rush-this-to-the-store-before-President-Bush -wins-this-war-on-terrorism-thing-and-we-lose-a-great -chance-to-make-some-bucks" smell. Don't buy this game. Play Rainbow Six (or any of its progeny), Counterstrike, S.W.A.T., or Ghost Recon. Play whatever you like, but don't--unless you are either very wealthy of very hard up--plop down your bucks for this one. A self-claimed, semi-realistic first-person shooter, Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror is plagued by poor pacing, cartoon realism, and the most frustrating play this side of the blind-folded Jedi against the drone training sessions.

Infogrames must have figured that they couldn't miss. After all, everything anti-terrorism is cool (unless you have a friend or loved one on the ground in Afghanistan), first-person realistic shooters are cool, and TacOps, which began life as a free download, required little development money. But somehow Infogrames not only missed, but missed by a wide margin. First a bit of background...

Although playable in single-player mode, Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror
TacOps attempts to be a realistic squad based shooter cut in the Rainbow Six mold, yet team orders may not be given in first person mode, nor is there the time to creep, blast, set ambushes, or perform any other tactical option that soldiers use. In short, it plays more like a game of Unreal Tournament (which it began life as mod for) than a realistic shooter.

And hey, Unreal Tournament with military skins, modern weapons, and bulletproof vests would be fine...if the damage model matched the play. But unfortunately Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror subscribes to the one-hit-one kill myth. Let me jump out of review mode for a second to offer a bit of first-person shooter design advice...

Wake up designers; a 5.56mm round grazing a forearm doesn't kill.

Meanwhile, back on the game review ranch... (Am I using too many ellipses here?). Tactical Ops' one-hit-one kill damage model, coupled with the frantic, Unreal Tournament pace of play provides quite the frustrating experience. Frequently, my part of a mission lasted less than a minute, and often I was killed before I got off more than a handful of shots. Now, I must admit that also happened to me in Ghost Recon. But in that game, I could figure out what I did wrong, change my tactics, issue different orders to my squad, and beat the mission. Here there is no analysis. You are killed because you aren't quick enough, and in single player mode there is no way to order your squad to help. It's many things: frustrating, aggravating, irritating, but one thing that it isn't, is fun.

But let's, as Judge Judy says, "be fair." You may alter the game's speed, the AI 'bot's intelligence, and the damage model. If you play with the settings long enough you'll come up with a playable game. Problem is, why should you have to do that? Isn't it the publisher/designer's responsibility to deliver a playable game right out of the box?

Whatever the answer, Infogrames' Tactical Ops is a game that few people will mess with long enough to discover scalability. The game can be made fun, by why hassle with it? There are too many good tactical shooters on the market, to waste your money on this one.

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