Special Forces: Nemesis Strike (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.0 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 05/31/2005
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 03/24/2005
• Originally published on GameSpot: Special Forces: Nemesis Strike (PC) Review

Hip Games' Special Forces: Nemesis Strike, or CT Special Forces: Nemesis Strike, depending on whether you believe the box art or the game's main title screen, is a console and PC reenvisioning of the publisher's semi-obscure CT Special Forces franchise, which has existed solely on the GBA up to this point. However, whereas the GBA CT games were thoroughly competent knockoffs of the Metal Slug franchise, there's nothing particularly competent about Nemesis Strike. Essentially trying to ape everything from Splinter Cell to kill.switch, Nemesis Strike throws far too many disparate parts into one cluttered mess, and it doesn't bother to polish any of them beyond what was required to get the game gold and onto store shelves. It's a trite and aggressively boring version of what a million other third-person action games have done. And even for its budget price, it's a pretty lousy value.

In Special Forces: Nemesis Strike, you fight terrorists. That's it. That's all the plot you need to know, because that's as much of it as makes sense. You play two different characters throughout the adventure: Raptor, a scenery-chewing commando type that falls somewhere between Jesse "The Body" Ventura from Predator and Thunder in Paradise-era Hulk Hogan (in terms of action-hero bravado and credibility), and Stealth Owl, a predictable copycat of just about every other stealth action hero of the last decade. As these two knuckleheads, you penetrate various locales that have been overrun by terrorists (gasp!) and shoot them all in the face--over and over again--occasionally stopping to fight a ludicrously easy boss, rescue a painfully dumb artificially intelligent hostage, or drive a poorly designed vehicle.

When you play as Raptor, it's all run-and-gun, so you blast away at nasty terrorists with little regard for anything else. Occasionally, you'll have to duck and cover. And when you do, in a kill.switch-influenced mechanic, you can peer around the corner to fire, or you can just poke your weapon out and blind-fire, with a slight accuracy decrease. Of course, that accuracy decrease would only matter if the weapons were even accurate to begin with. Unless you're standing dead still and manually aiming the reticle as precisely as you can, chances are you're going to miss a lot of shots. The machine guns fire wildly, throwing bullets practically everywhere except where the nearest enemy is, and the shotgun even seems to bypass enemies at close range from time to time. As Raptor, you'll also find yourself driving occasional vehicles, like snow sleds, hovercraft, and what have you. However, no matter what kind of vehicle you're driving, they all handle exactly the same, which is to say, badly. Turns are impossibly jerky, every vehicle has a preternatural tendency to slide out, and the few that feature mounted weapons just seem underwhelming in terms of impact.

Granted, Raptor's levels are practically money in the bank compared to Owl's ill-conceived stealth levels. Mechanically, Owl works much the same as Raptor, only with a different variety of weapons that don't hit their targets and a couple of different grenade types that are cool ideas but are poorly executed. Basically, when you toss them, they'll either magnetically pull or repel any metal objects in the room. Again, this is a cool concept, but it's terribly underused throughout the game. All you ever really do is use them to move metal boxes and occasionally pull the weapons from your enemies' hands. Apart from all that, since Owl is a stealthy fellow, you can turn on a Predator-inspired invisibility suit that actually doesn't really work very well. Even though you're supposed to be invisible, enemies will immediately become alerted to your presence if you get within 20 feet of them.

On the plus side, your enemies are idiots, and they're terrible at actually shooting you. You can stand just outside of their detection ranges, picking them off with headshots one by one, and they'll just stand there looking bewildered. That's not to say the game is by any means a walk in the park, but instead of improving the AI of the ground troops, the developer made the game harder by sticking a bunch of snipers and guys with rocket launchers on rooftops. While it's understandable that rocket launchers would kill you pretty quickly (and you can actually dodge the rockets reasonably easily), the snipers are ridiculously overpowered and overly accurate, picking you off from incredible distances with only a couple of shots needed to kill you. Hell, even Vassili Zaitsev would be jealous of their skills.

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