SOCOM: Special Forces Review (PS3)

Solitary brother….. now has some friends

After the severe disappointment that was SOCOM: Confrontation, Zipper Interactive have a pretty big hill to climb. Not only was Confrontation lacking any single player campaign, the multiplayer was limited and so heavily bug-ridden that most gamers didn’t stick with it until the fixes that cleaned most of it up. So SOCOM 4 has shipped with some pretty big changes needing to be made, and I can thankfully say that most have been met.

SOCOM 4’s single player campaign puts you in the shoes of Cullen Gray, the leader of a NATO Ops squad working in Malaysia against mercenaries and guerilla forces trying to change the political tide. My apologies if this is a little hazy, but the first problem shows itself right here: it’s pretty tough to understand whats going on, and basically the game descends into a series of set pieces featuring Gray and his small squad taking on waves of enemies to perform simple tasks. A third person cover-based system is in place with some pretty good squad command abilities included – your two squads are cleanly split into heavy weapons (for close combat) and covert ops (for sniping), and utilizing your guys is key to success. The AI of your teammates is pretty good too, as they can often refuse to walk blindly into fire or fall back when becoming heavily suppressed and certainly do a good job of racking up their own kills during the campaign.

Some sections flip the gameplay into stealthy MGS-style shadowplay, as you take control of the memorable Forty-Five, a Korean operative who is the only real shining character in the game. These sections eschew the guns-and-tactics style of the main game into creeping in the dark and avoiding being spotted. Often these sections are then replayed afterwards by the full team, and working out routes and tactics during the stealth can reap good rewards for the hard combat sessions.

The problem I have with SOCOM is that it does little more than repeat the same formula that we first saw on the PS2 – too often an entire level can be beaten soundly by repeating simple spread-out-and-suppress tactics, and leaving your teammates to mop up the leftovers. It just doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything new, and the opportunity for some large scale tight combat seems to have been missed, particularly when titles such as Brothers in Arms have been doing so for some time now. It’s just a bit too linear, and this often leads to a lack of innovative play – which is a shame as cover based games cry out for allowing some real tactical thinking. It’s all over a little quickly, too, although this seems to becoming a common issue in most high profile titles recently, further compounded by the fact that most of the levels are just a bit too samey – lots of dust, some bits of shrubbery and a few buildings dotted along the (clearly marked) path.

Visually, SOCOM falls a little flat. Although character models are great, often many textures and buildings look terrible, employing low-res tiles to fill space and generally taking off a lot of the high quality sheen. The shame of this is, had this been released instead of Confrontation, Zipper Interactive would have gotten away with it, but so late on in the current console generation it just seems a bit dated and stale. The sound effects and rousing music is pretty good, although often the voice acting is too rapid or quiet, often making the already confusing plot line even further obscured.

On to the multiplayer, then, and here SOCOM shines a little brighter. By switching the main missions out for Co-op and versus, the game starts to come into its own as real players fill the shoes of the vapid single player squad. Co-op is particularly good fun, being split into two game types: hunt the VIP, and intelligence gathering. Both are good fun to play, and require a good balance of tactics and skills to survive at the higher skill levels, although I was confused as to the lack of a squad commander option for directing the action. The maps are pretty good too, although again, I can’t help but feel that Zipper Interactive have played it safe and avoided the chance of really pushing the Co-op to a greater level.

Versus is where you’ll find most players, however, and the SOCOM formula feels quite polished here. Working in teams for a number of objectives based on game type (capture the flag, protect the Bomb Expert, Team deathmatch and capture the zone), SOCOMs fast, quick shoot-and-cover style fits nicely with some really tense battling in the hotzones that form during the match.

Communication is key to survival, and the best teams work together to complete their objectives. Personally, I liked Bomb Expert the best, as often one good bit of skilful play could change the game instantly, and often this lead to some pretty tense play. It’s all pretty good fun, although I’d be hard pressed to say it’s going to pull gamers away from Black Ops or Battlefield BC2. The now-standard perks and unlocks system is in place, but again, it’s all a little too safe, a little too stale, and just not quite shiny enough to really stand out in today’s top-heavy shooter market.

It’s a shame, then, that a pretty good shooter has managed to stay so average: SOCOM isn’t a bad game, its just an average game in a sea of top notch titles. My overwhelming feeling has been one of an opportunity lost, as well as a game that fails to really stretch out and define itself as something just a little different. Fans of the series will be happy that the series finally has a decent entry on the PS3, but it just feels a bit too little too late. This is the game that Confrontation should have been, and by the time SOCOM 4 arrived we could have seen some real innovation and ideas flowing into the long lived Sony exclusive. Even Move support won’t be enough to give this game proper legs, and with current new titles such as Crysis 2, LA Noire and Portal 2 blowing gamers away, I see SOCOM being drowned out by a sea of genuine top quality.