Since season 1, I have always been a huge fan of 24. Similar to Jeremy Clarkson, everything stops for 24. The captivating plots, never ending twists and turns, unique direction and use of camera angles are mind blowing. Who cares that each season follows the same basic path; Terrorist blows something up, Jack Bauer gets angry, Kim Bauer gets kidnapped, something else blows up, President gets shot, Terrorist dies in raid, etc. What is great is how it all comes together and builds to a crescendo of guns, violence and Elisha Cuthbert being naked. Well, hopefully someday.
If you’re not a follower of 24 then this may be a bit of a confusing story. If you are – then great, it ties up all the loose ends left hanging at the end of season 2; like how Kim Bauer got her job at CTU, where Chase Edmunds came from and who tried to assassinate President Palmer. Everything you expect from the TV series, you get in the game, which makes sense as the writers of the TV show wrote the game as well.
Without ruining the plot too much I’ll try and summarise the ins and outs of 24: The Game. You start as Jack, who is preparing to storm a boat carrying a huge cache of weapons, and a lot of a chemical weapon called Ricin. That’s where the story sort of starts, which is then followed by the usual kidnappings, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks ‘ just the norm for our CTU hard nut Bauer.
Now, despite Sony originally claiming that the game would have around 24 hours of game life to match the whole point of a 24 based game, I’m sad to say that it doesn’t. I managed to breeze through it in a little shy of six and unless you’re blind or mentally disturbed, it should be around 10 at the most. The problem with it all is that the developers were so eager to capture the whole 24 experience that they forgot to make sure the essence was there before adding some other pointless mini-game to waste time on.
Which leads me nicely on to the side missions. Throughout the game, you will be asked to hack into various pieces of equipment or decipher some code by switching letters around with one another. There are parts where you need to find a path from one file to another via a route by selecting the button that corresponds to that route in a set time. Now, unless I’m mistaken, I remember those on the back of Happy Meals, and those were even more challenging than the ones set in the game. The cars in driving sections max out at around 10mph, and there are too many of these parts. The only half decent mini-game on offer is when the interrogation scenes come into effect. It consists of the terrorist/witness’ heart rate, a small band known as the ‘breaking strip’ and three button selections each enabling a different interrogation technique: aggressive, passive or calm. You then need to stop the heart rate inside the ‘breaking strip’ in order to get an answer. Do this 10 times and you have succeeded. Sounds simple enough, which is desperately sad since that is basically the most challenging part of the whole game.
The rest of it is a fairly simple ‘run and gun’ style 3rd person shooter. Very little thinking is required to complete a mission, just follow the yellow arrow on your mini-map. Oh, and kill whatever stumbling enemy AI you come across. Not that the AI are stupid, probably better to say I would have more fear against the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz. They prefer to stand around and get shot, or if they’re really brave, they will walk straight at you, popping off a couple of rounds in the process.
The only problems I noticed in a fire fight is that while its all good and easy, things are made extremely difficult by the epileptic camera and the renegade aiming reticle which prefers you to shoot the enemy behind cover, rather than the one with the gun to you’re head. It may be two button shooting but when you have a camera angle that is never in the right place and a targeting system that never really works it actually becomes a bit of a task.
So far, nothing seems to have been pulled off with any finesse, so that means it must be an absolutely stunning game visually’well yes and no. The cut scenes are just amazingly directed and put together. It’s the only time anything comes close to feeling like 24. The voice overs are brilliant with every actor providing their talent to the game. This is all well and good if you played a cut scene, but you don’t. Instead you get stuck with a slow frame rate coupled with graphics that a PS1 wouldn’t struggle with.
