Project IGI: I'm Going In

'Tis the Season to be Jolly

Don't you just love Christmas? Huge turkey dinners with all the trimmings, acres of presents to unwrap, and heap upon mountainous heap of all that lovely Christmas pud. But do you know what the best part is? All those mouth-watering games that have been in development since what seems like the dawn of time are finally put on the shelves adorned by the usual lavishings of fake frost and tinsel. Shiny's Sacrifice is already on the shelves, Giants is soon to grace us with its equally mouth-watering presence as are two uber-shooters: Hitman Codename 47 and Project IGI. Now this is going to be one hell of a Christmas... if that's the right way to put it.

Project IGI, like all the others listed above, has something of an identity crisis. IGI isn't an all-out blaster like Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament, nor is it a softly-softly sneaker like Rainbow Six. Instead, it lies somewhere in-between the precise whispers of SWAT 3 and the machismo-induced rompings of Delta Force. Tactics are important, but you've also got to be quick on the draw. Imagine a kind of updated Goldeneye and you're nearly, but not quite, there.

The storyline is reasonably well written but largely irrelevant. You play David Jones, a British freelance secret agent who has been contracted by the American Secret Services to recover Josef Priboi, who has information about a stolen nuclear weapon. The plot doesn't progress much through the game because it takes a good while before you actually capture him, and even once he's been captured, you lose him and have to go after him again. Basically the game consists of sneaking into Eastern European military camps and completing your objective, but it turns out to be just a little more complicated than that.

But the first thing you notice is that this game is no Thief-like sneak-em-up. You have a knife you can use for silent takedowns, but the only time you'll use it is when you're desperately low on ammo. No, IGI is all about planning and perfect execution. Instead of going through an endless amount of mind-numbing Rainbow Six-style planning phases, you have a link to a satellite map and some hefty binoculars. More often than not, you start a good way outside the base, so you sneak up, crack open the binoc's and have a good nosey at what's going on inside.

At first you don't realise what you have to do, but planning is essential for a clean, silent raid. You watch guards go on their patrol routes and decide on the best time to strike. Snipers positioned on watchtowers also cause a menace, so you have to figure out the best way to take them down. The satellite map gives you (sketchy) details on people inside buildings so you can plan on the best way to break in. You can even pick out the security cameras and either avoid them or take them out so you don't raise the alarm and have half the base homing in on your position. It sounds a lot, and indeed it is a lot, but it never becomes overwhelming. If your plan goes wrong, you know exactly why and get to try again, this time taking into account the problem and working around it.

Eye Candy

What isn't so good, especially for those with a lust for eye-candy, is that the graphics are disappointingly spartan. Although the textures are excellent, the smoke effects look primitive and the trees look decidedly 2D, but for some reason it's very processor intensive. Anything less than a P3/450 and the draw distance will be almost unacceptably low, with bits and pieces popping up out of thin air, which becomes very noticeable when you're zooming in on a distant sentry with the binoculars. As a contrast, the animation is utterly superb. It's not just the usual running about that's done well, but mostly when people get shot. Hit someone in the leg and it suddenly goes limp, the victim grabbing hold of the wound. Shoot someone enough times in the torso and they'll kneel down, putting their hands over their stomachs before dying. You can even graze someone's hand and they'll shake it about in pain. Headshots are lethal, as to be expected, but some enemies have different levels of armour over their chest, so take more shots to put down. It's all absolutely brilliant.

What helps to make up for the graphics (if the animation hasn't already) are the huge playing areas and accurately modeled ballistics. The landscapes you get to wander about in are absolutely enormous; if you want to, you can wander literally miles upon miles away from the base. There'd be nothing to see and no reason to go there but it just shows the sheer scope of the thing. What's more relevant, however, is the ballistics - put simply, there are some substances bullets will pass through and some substances they won't. At first it isn't clear what this means, but the more you play, the more you can see it adds a whole new dimension to gameplay. For a start you think about your cover a lot more. Watch towers are made largely from wood, and while this means it's easy to dispatch snipers (you can just shoot through the wood and if the shot's on target it'll hit the guard) it's also easy for other bad guys to hit you. If you open a door and someone opens fire on you then ducking back behind a thin plaster wall won't help as millions of little shotguns pellets rip through your supposed cover and into you. It's not just structures either, bullets can just as easily rip through people and if you're lucky you can take two people down with one shot.

The weapons themselves are so finely balanced, there isn't another game out that can touch IGI in this department. Every weapon has a specific role, but in many games this is more in theory than practise. Shotguns are supposed to be good for clearing the indoors but in most cases, it would be only marginally better than some grenade launcher for example. However, IGI takes this to a new level. Sniper rifles are perfected tailored to long ranges, but if you want to use them at close range you have to be very accurate. Uzi's are good for light powered, short range work but can't cope with the outside because both it's power and accuracy drops off with distance so you need a good machine gun such as the AK-47. They even have different penetration values on armour; high-powered machine gun rounds will have good penetration whereas handguns need emptying to achieve the same result. It all makes you think what you need to do and how to do it, you don't have to plan for hours but you can't go barging into rooms either. It is, in fact, the perfect balance because more than anything it makes you feel like the secret agent you're supposed to be.

Saving Grace

What may jar with some people is the fact that there's no in-mission save. You can, in theory, get all the way to the end, be dragging yourself along on a minuscule amount of health and then be killed by some unseen sniper 200 metres away. Now this is down to personal taste, but I never found the lack of an in game save to be a problem. In fact, it helped the gameplay immensely. For a start, the game is very clean. There's only the odd graphical error or missing building information on the map so you're unlikely to have your all your hard work undone by a crash. Nor are the missions overtly long. Once you've figured out what to do, you can easily complete them in around 30-45 minutes apiece. What's more, if you do have to start again, you know exactly what's gone wrong and there aren't any ridiculous mistakes in the game design so you never die through a game fault, only your own. The lack of an in game save also makes for unparalleled tension. Every time your health drops, you feel a little more pressure on your shoulders which gets heavier and heavier until your palms are literally sweating and you breathe a huge sigh of relief when the mission is finally accomplished. Such tension and indeed such atmosphere would have been impossible to accomplish even with a limited in game save system. The way IGI is designed means you are immersed in the game like never before.

But what is a let down, and surprisingly so for a game of this calibre, is the occasionally awful AI. On more than one occasion in the earlier levels, guards sauntered straight past on their patrol routes. As long as I wasn't firing a gun, they couldn't care what I was doing. They also make no use of cover whatsoever. They could be right next to a concrete wall but they'd rather run out into the open to attack. The problem doesn't get any better inside buildings, either. Open fire on a guard and they'll stay glued to the same spot, only opening fire when you poke your head through. Either that or they run straight past you then turn around and open fire, if you haven't blown them to pieces by then, of course. The problems would be bad enough in any game but when in a game of this quality, they stand out like a sore thumb at first, although you do eventually get used to it and by the end you won't be questioning what they're doing, though it doesn't make it any more logical.

It's these AI problems along with the occasionally poor graphics that bring Project IGI down from a much-coveted GDR-Gold to a Silver. This is the Goldeneye of its day and deserves to be lauded as such. The wonderfully modeled ballistics, exquisite animation, finely balanced weaponry and pure immersion in the game are simply fantastic. More than anything, IGI makes you feel like you're a secret service agent and this is the main reason for its success. If there's going to be one game out this Christmas that will appeal to just about all gamers, it's Project IGI. Just can't wait for the expansion pack.

Review By GamesDomain