My girlfriend is not an idiot – she’s just finishing off a PhD – nor is she new to bloodthirsty shooters – she’s a veteran of Syphon Filter and Resident Evil. But within 30 seconds of taking over the controller in SOCOM 3, two of her four-man team were lying dead in the desert and she was running one way, firing the other, and screaming ‘Someone’s shooting! Someone’s shooting!’
I guess some games are just for the boys.
The front end looks like it should be occupying a giant screen on the back wall of a high-tech military bunker, several miles underground. The main menus include options like ‘quick deploy’, difficulty levels ranging from Ensign to Admiral, and missions with neatly understated titles, like ‘Operation Global Fury’.
You’re given a detailed mission briefing, a list of objectives and a small team of experts that you can control with commands chosen from an on-screen menu or, if you’ve got a headset, by shouting frantically to nobody in particular. Missions mainly consist of, er, killing. It’s all fairly straightforward: reach a succession of big yellow triangles – the on-screen navigation points – without being shot, blown up or run over. Of course you have to disable things, deal with hostiles, and coordinate your fire team along the way but, hell, no one said it would be easy, buddy.
A tidy training mission, in which you fight to an extraction point in the middle of a North African civil war, does a fine job of teaching you the basic controls: changing weapons, boarding and operating vehicles, sneaking about, swimming, climbing and shooting people in the head.
Then follow twelve missions in three locations: Northern Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southern Asia. Each mission is packed with authentic military uniforms, weapons including assault rifles, pistols, claymores, and RPGs, and a whole range of driveable vehicles from cargo trucks, and SUVs to armoured boats. Nice touches include being able to hide underwater, and outnumbered hostiles throwing down their guns to surrender. Assuming you don’t shoot them accidentally, you can restrain them. Allied forces will take them into custody later and subject them to the proper degradation, humiliation and torture. In case you forget that you’re out there saving the world, the background music soars from mawkish sentimentality, through patriotic fervour, to supermacho ‘win or die’ glory.
The AI is at times brainless: enemies will fall onto their bellies in the dust and start crawling towards you without a scrap of cover and from a few feet away. Though the environments are imaginative and sometimes stunning, they’re not always interactive: crash into a burnt-out car in a tank, and your tank stops dead with a clunk; and anyone who’s played Black will be disappointed not to be able to shoot the shit out of everything. In that game, a gravestone will provide cover only until it’s smashed into pieces by sustained fire. In SOCOM 3, crawling into a tent will protect you indefinitely.
But all of this is just to let you gain familiarity with the weapons, tactics and locations before you take SOCOM 3 online. The original SOCOM was released on the same day as Sony’s network adapter and the series remains the PS2’s flagship online game. Here, in the thick of a 32 man battle between terrorists and US Navy SEALs, is where you’ll prove you’ve got the cojones for special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare and direct action. Or, like me, you’ll skulk off to make up with your girlfriend after single handedly dooming your team to defeat by being gunned down nine times in 12 pitiful minutes.
