24: The Game

THE BAD:
Gameplay not nearly as good as it could have been. Its not bad enough to say that the developers just wanted a quick buck off of the license, but its not nearly as good as other games in the genre.

SUMMARY:
Any fan of 24 should play through this game at least once. It has a fantastic story, and the presentation is nearly perfect.

The gameplay issues, while a bit irritating, are not something that will keep the average gamer from finishing the game and seeing the entire story.

Movement is kinda clunky, and I found myself moving Jack, or any other character around mostly in the slower moving stealth mode, so I could keep them from going all over the place with just a nudge of the analog stick.

Gunplay is pretty good, I recommend that the aim assist be turned off from the outset, as the CPU has a bit of trouble with threat recognition. I want to target the guy 2 feet from me emptying his gun in my direction, and the CPU aim assist targets the guy at the back of the room. Kinda annoying.

Driving is horrific. There is no visual representation of speed, all the vehicles, save for the sports car you see in one mission, feel extremely heavy and slow. At the vehicle's top speed, it looks as if youre going along at about 30 mph. But the game's control acts as if the car is going 110, and controls just the same. So youre driving along at what looks like a slow speed, but youre all over the road when you try to maneuver the vehicle. Its very laborious and annoying at times.

Close combat is just as abysmal. The characters forego the option of taking a rifle butt or pistol grip to the head of their enemies, and just go with a lame sort of punching attack. You trade punches with the enemy in a ridiculous fashion, and it just makes you wonder why they even incorporated a close combat system at all if they were going to do it that badly.


The game length is rather short, around 8 hours, and its linear structure will be a turnoff to many gamers who are fans of the open ended, free roaming structure that many games now use.


Bottom line, if youre a fan of the show, you should rent this game and see the story. If you like it, then you can add it to your collection of 24 DVDs. For the average gamer who isnt a fan of the show, you may not even want to finish the game.

Im a fan of the show, and I can safely say that the presentation and storyline are what kept me playing to the end, not the gameplay.

Not the worst game out there, but definately could have been better. If youre a fan of story driven gameplay, you should check out 24. If youre a gameplay first, story later person, better steer clear of 24.

THE BAD:
- Not the best graphics: not terrible either, but there are better looking games out there
- No co-operative multiplayer: imagine Jack and Tony working together...?
- Not actually real time: more like 14 than 24

SUMMARY:
The following takes place between 6:00am and 7:00am...

An anonymous phone call from a public pay booth near the Los Angeles docks informs Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that a shipment of illegal weapons, plus a deadly ricin biotoxin bomb, has arrived. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) leads a SWAT unit to seize the shipment and diffuse the bomb. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, DC CTU agent Chase Edmunds (James Badge Dale) is working undercover with a group of terrorists who are planning to assassinate Vice-President Jim Prescott in LA later on in the day. Blowing his cover to warn CTU in LA, he becomes a target of the people he's working with.

As the day progresses, Jack's daughter Kimberly Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert) starts her first day as a temp worker at CTU, and ends up working alongside Michelle Dessller (Reiko Aylesworth) when an enemy agent from Jack's past raids the building for a hard-drive containing information about their plans. Special Agent in Charge Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) stops a deadly ricin attack on a subway in LA before uncovering evidence that implicates Governor of California James Radford in the terrorist plot. A deadly earthquake, caused by a well-placed bomb somewhere underground, rips through LA. All the while, President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) recovers from the attempt on his life that occurred six months previous, trying to cope with the stress of the day's events.

You're now panicking about having missed a season of the excellent television show, 24, aren't you? Don't worry, you haven't. The above is the convoluted plot of '24: The Game', a superb PlayStation2 title that takes place between Season 2 and Season 3 and answers all of the questions that were left hanging after Palmer was seen dying in the street at 7:00am after the second longest day of Jack Bauer's life. Offering players the chance to step into the world of counter-terrorism in the high drama, high action and high suspense world of 24, this game is an unparalleled success.

There are three main modes of play that will confront your characters in '24: The Game'. Firstly, and predominantly, you control a character in a third-person shooter game. Missions ranging from stealthy infiltration without alerting guards, all-out assault on an enemy base, undercover missions where you must act naturally or be rumbled as a government agent or chasing a fleeing suspect through alleyways all come up in the course of the story. Mainly, you're Jack, running and gunning in his usual style, but often you'll play as another CTU agent: Chase, Tony, Michelle and even Kim are playable. In fact, one of the more interesting missions of the game sees Kim, who hasn't had weapons training, sneaking through a locked down CTU without any means of defending herself... incredibly tense, edgy movements and ducking behind crates have never been so loaded with excitement. Gunplay is the standard fare, with L1 targeting your enemy and R1 blasting them away, Circle performing a duck-and-roll move, X making you take cover behind walls or desks, etc. In fact, if you've ever played 'James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing' or 'From Russia With Love', you'll feel right at home. A nice addition, however, exclusive to '24: The Game' is the speech button. Far from being the catchphrase-reeling useless function of 'Terminator 3: The Redemption', this allows you to issue commands to the various characters you'll come across. Target an enemy and press R2, and your character will call out "CTU! Hands in the air!", and if they don't co-operate, a shot to the arm or leg will force them to drop their gun and raise their arms, leaving you to either handcuff them or snap their neck. Civilians in danger of being shot in a crossfire can be faced and told "I'm a federal agent, keep down!", and other characters following you can be instructed to "Wait here and stay covered!" or "Follow me, slowly!" This really adds to the interactivity of the gameplay and makes for tactical approaches to situations that would otherwise be very similar.

It's also a helpful feature in the driving missions. If you find yourself stranded without a car in '24: The Game', a quick tap of R2 will call out "Federal agent, I need this vehicle!" and allow you to commandeer a new set of wheels. The driving is one of the carefully thought out sections of the experience. The camera and driving physics have been tweaked to make sliding round corners and spinning your car very cinematic and over-the-top, just like 24 on television. There are the usual range of sports cars, saloons, SUVs and trucks to be had, and missions are usually timed dashes across town or carry the objective of tailing a suspect, mainly while fending off enemy vehicles that try to ram you off the road. A satisfying handbrake turn at the right moment will send them sailing off into a wall (resulting in a lovely big fireball of death), and this makes the driving sections rewarding.

Thirdly, computer-based mini-games pepper the action, usually taking place back at CTU headquarters. These are fun little segments of logical puzzle-solving: use a satellite to pinpoint enemies in buildings around Jack's location by their heat signatures, break into secured files using a scrambled code, pressing sequences of buttons, memory tests and a few mazes aren't as dull as they sound, especially since the famous 24 ticking clock is ever-present, adding to the layer of tension as you try to remember which path was blocked by FBI servers and which wasn't as you hack into secured files.

Admittedly, '24: The Game' isn't as pretty as it could have been. There are better looking games available on the market (mainly from EA Games), but having said that, it's not that big a problem. The graphics are good enough, the framerate slowdown (of which there is a little) is barely noticeable, all the cast likenesses are very accurate and the interactive environments are well-detailed. The atmosphere, suspense and storyline are so immersive that you buy the entire package and don't really question anything until you've beaten the final mission on board a luxury yacht and seen the final cutscene in which Jack... oh, no, I won't spoil it for you. As noted above in The Good, the music is provided by 24 and 'James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing' veteran Sean Callery, capping off that 24 feel to perfection, and the sound effects are all satisfyingly over-the-top, exaggerated roars, blasts and screeches of tyres.

The only two downsides that may sway your opinion of '24: The Game' are as follows: one, there isn't any kind of multiplayer. Sure, a deathmatch is out of the question based on the plot, but a co-operative selection would have been brilliant, having Jack and Tony storming a building or Jack and Kim trying to escape a terrorist base together, or one man hacking a satellite to call out sniper positions while the other picks them off...? Two, while it would be nigh-on impossible for a game (where the player has total freedom over his actions and therefore how long he/she takes) to be real-time, '24: The Game' is more like '14: The Game'. Each hour, made up of smaller missions, takes between twenty minutes and three-quarters of an hour to pass. You won't really care, and the jumps in time are covered well in the storyline, but as its 24...

Forget about the last paragraph, however, as '24: The Game' is literally amazing. We aren't talking genre-redefining stuff, but any fan of the show or any fan of action-adventure shooting games will simply adore kicking down doors and yelling "CTU! On the floor, now!" and travelling sideways round a corner before smashing through an alleyway filled with cardboard boxes at breakneck speed. '24: The Game' is everything you could ever want from a 24 game, and everything you could ever want from a 24 product or story.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get to play out your very own longest day.