Soldier Elite (PC)

Metropolis Software's Soldier Elite is like a low-budget, direct-to-video version of Metal Gear Solid. It doesn't have the big names, the peerless production values, or the engaging, intricate plotline. Instead, this Polish-developed third-person stealth action game is saddled with frustrating, half-realized sneaking mechanics, English-as-a-second-language voice acting, and very little inspiration or originality. In short, this is a bad facsimile of a much better game and has a hard time justifying its existence.

Kicking things off derivatively, Soldier Elite casts you in the role of White Fox, a grizzled operative who has retired himself into the cozy confines of alcoholism, only to be begrudgingly called back into service for an extra-special mission involving terrorists, a sunken nuclear submarine, and, somehow, zombies. Like Metal Gear Solid's story, the story here can be difficult to follow. Unlike Metal Gear Solid's difficulties, though, Soldier Elite's problems are due to clumsy storytelling and some phenomenally bad voice work, rather than dense and intricate plotting. Like his serpentine role model, White Fox gets dropped off at an Arctic military research station staffed by unfriendly and eagle-eyed soldiers. From there, it becomes a game of trial and error supported by liberal use of the quicksave and quickload features.

Soldier Elite gets the fundamental conceit behind stealth action, which is that you have a better chance of surviving if you avoid face-to-face enemy encounters, but the tools it gives you to make that happen are few, and what's there is often broken. Save for the moments when you're looking down the barrel of your standard-issue sniper rifle, the game is played from a third-person perspective. You can tap the spacebar to switch between a behind-the-back view and an overhead view, the latter of which is ostensibly for improved sneaking, though since it doesn't show you much that can't be seen in your onscreen minimap, and it actually reduces your range of vision, it's basically useless.

The basic controls use a standard WASD keyboard-and-mouse configuration, though there are a few goofy quirks tossed in there for good measure. You can modulate the speed of White Fox's movement using the mouse wheel, which goes from sneaking, to walking, to running. The faster you move, the more noise you make, though even at his fastest gait, White Fox's movement is pretty sluggish, and even though enemies can hear your footsteps through walls if you run too fast down a hallway, they're all but oblivious to gunfire. This kind of inconsistency in the enemy's response to your presence is the cause of much frustration in Soldier Elite. On the default difficulty setting, you'll regularly find yourself spotted by enemies so far away that they don't even appear on your minimap, and it's basically impossible to discern where their line of sight begins or ends.

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