IGI stands for
I'm Going In, to start with, okay....
I fickin love this game, and I got some real good reasons why. Firstly
though, what's it all about?
It's a first person shooter on the PC, in the same category
as Half-Life or Unreal but with a slightly different twist and approach
to things. The storyline though....
You are David Jones, a former SAS agent. After serving in various
black operations in the time period up to and including the Gulf War, you
retire due to an injury. Recovering, you go back to work. The only
difference now is you are a freelance agent. You do 'odd jobs' for a joint
British/U.S. intelligence operation. You're basically a James Bond type
person, this is backed up by the fact that David Jones is voiced by Sean
Bean, who of course was in Goldeneye.
In the game, you are launched into an increasingly difficult series of
missions, revolving around a stolen Russian nuke and the Russian gangster
who took it, Josef Priboi. You take your mission orders and intel from
Anya, whose main job is to tell you what your mission is each time. Then
sometimes she tells you some crap during the game which I don't pay too much
attention to, stupid woman, always trying to interfere, I mean I got bullets
buzzing all around me and all she can say is that there's heavy resistance,
well....no shit!
When I started playing this game I couldn't give a toss about the
storyline, yeah I gotta get a nuke, yeah ok, can I go and shoot some bad
guys now, ok I gotta get the Russian first, right ok, but before that I get
to shoot bad guys, and creep around everywhere yeah? yeah, WOOHOO!
I'll tell you what I especially like about this game, and what makes it
uniquely different from all the other available:
When you start a mission, you're normally a couple of minutes walk
away from an enemy base, situated in a mountainous area. Now you can
approach the base from any angle you want, although there's normally only
one way in, but that's fair enough.
The enemy don't know you're coming, so you creep around, staying out
of sight. I love this sort of gameplay, you don't just go in there all guns
blazing, you have to think about where you are, what cover's available, are
you in the enemy's line of sight. There's also security cameras which you
have to look out for, if you stay in sight too long they set the alarm off
and bad guys start running about looking for you. If the cameras do see
you, they start to beep, and the beeping gets faster until it's a continuos
high pitched noise, that's when the alarm go's off, so as soon as you start
to hear that bleep you shit your pants looking for the thing so you can put
a bullet through its lens. Although if you can handle your shit, and you
know where they'll all come running from, you change to your M16 or AK47,
crouch down, and pick them all off as they come running out, oh man that's
some satisfying shit, although they were men with families at home, just
earning a crust, but, oh well.
The guns in this game are just so satisfying, more then in any
other game I've played, and I'm including the MP5 in Half-Life, man I love
that MP5. My favourite in IGI is the M16 with the M203 grenade
launcher. Firstly the sound it makes, ratta tat tat, how else can I
describe it, it's meaty, with big flashes coming from the end of the
barrel. The underslung M203 just finishes it off. It's much better then
the grenade launcher in Half-Life, which only shoots the thing 10 yards
with no great accuracy. With the one in IGI you can take a group of bad guys
out from 200 yards away with accuracy.
I adore the shear simplicity of the game, as opposed to something
like Janes F15, where you have to read 200 pages of the instruction manual
just to take off! All games should be so simple that you don't need an
instruction manual.
What I most love about this game though, is that you can play it
using your own rules. You know I said about the fact you can stalk the
enemy base and attack from any direction, well that's something that's great
fun. What I'm talking about though, is when you start setting yourself
little challenges, for example. In one level named 'Radar Base' I set myself
the challenge of completing it, on hard, using only hand guns, the Glock
and the Desert Eagle, it's damn hard to do, and I could just switch to the
M16, but I want to do it using handguns, no matter how many restarts it
takes. A couple more examples of this......
-
In Motorcross Madness, me and my mate lofidan only had the demo,
but we set ourselves the challenge of who could get the single biggest point
jump, I think we ended up with something like 17000, which basically
involved staying in the air for about 10 seconds. Great fun!
- In Monster Truck Madness, again we only had the demo, but after a
while we weren't interested in if we could win the race. What caught our
eye was the train that ran through the course every so often, which was on
an embankment. We decided to see who could be the first to drive along by
the side of the train, then drive up the embankment and jump onto the top of
the train and then stay there. Now I don't think the programmers meant for
people to be doing this, and for a while we thought it was actually
impossible, then we did it, even if it did monkey around with the graphics a
bit.
This is the factor that determines the longevity of the gameplay. And
why I'm still playing this one mission out of the whole game all these
months after I first bought it. When you can play a level in an infinite
number of combinations it rules.
Of course I have some gripes about it.
On some of the harder levels the bad guys re-spawn, surely the
programmers could have come up with a more realistic way to make the game
harder?
Sometimes you walk up behind a bad guy, with the crosshairs of your
Glock on their head, pull the trigger, and for some reason you miss and
they turn around and lay into you with their AK47, while you're still
stuck there with your Glock.
No multiplayer function???
Sometimes you see an enemy and pull your trigger straight away, but
of course your computer can do it faster, and you get shot, and that's
just not fair!
Hopefully, you understand some of that, I'm wetting my pants in
anticipation of Project IGI 2, to be released in the UK in May hopefully,
although it will probably be put back a few months like every other game,
lousy software houses.