The enemies were slightly challenging. The AI needs more polish. They tend to shoot you with advanced accuracy, but can’t hit your teammates standing right next to them. In addition, enemies behind cover will show themselves in a precise and timely manner, allowing effortless timing of their reappearance for a good head shot. The redeeming feature to the poor AI exists in the game’s Delta Force difficulty setting. With this setting, you must complete the entire game with only one life. You can save the game on any level, as long as you are alive. If you happen to die then the entire game restarts at the first level, the saved game is invalid.
I always felt a game’s menu screen is an important contribution to the initial experience of suspended disbelief. Shadow Ops Red Mercury’s menus are clear and uncomplicated. The game’s designers chose a linear menu system, which produced a subtle resemblance of military computer terminals in most action films. Drilling down to specific options so simple, even a Marine would be able to change the graphic settings.
Today’s generation is hard to please, especially in the graphics department. In this age of technology, we expect better graphics and more options in our games. Although Shadow Ops Red Mercury’s graphics doesn’t come close to Doom 3, it still ranks well on the detail level. Weapons and explosives are somewhat accurate to real life models, but nothing the public hasn’t seen before. The attention to detail with the lighting, particles, and water textures in the Jungle levels produced a true sense and feel of the environment. Some maps needed more work, but none of the maps caused total sensory destruction of virtual reality. Albeit, the game’s surround sound contributed to the mood.
THX mastered Dolby 5.1 surround sound greatly enhances the atmosphere of this game. Hearing the enemy fire from your right and the bullet quickly zipping past your left shoulder will always get the blood pumping. Hearing the shouts from your teammates and enemy will hint to their location and distance. If you don’t use 5.1 surround sound, headphones worked well with this game. Although I lost some of the immersive feeling, it didn’t detract from the experience. One flaw to the sound category remains with the skipping dialogs during the cut scenes. Overall, the sound and music in Shadow Ops Red Mercury is commanding. Yet even THX mastered sound couldn’t save the multiplayer version of this game.
The multiplayer option is sad. I could only find three laggy servers in the entire world. Maybe it was the time of day I was connected, but that is still pretty sad. The models ran as though some evil doctor shot a gallon of botox in their legs. The rehashed maps from the single player campaign and presented no balance to the game play. It is obvious the developers spent little time and attention to the multiplayer version. I wouldn’t advise playing this at a LAN party, unless you are exceedingly drunk.
In the end, I found the single player version fun. The multiplayer needs an extreme makeover and doesn’t utilize the Unreal engine’s full capabilities. Shadow Ops Red Mercury reminded me of the old school first person shooter games like, Goldeneye and Turok the Dinosaur Hunter –without the cool weapons. The replay value of this game depends on which difficulty level you begin. The Delta Force difficulty brings on the challenge somewhat reminiscent of old arcade games like Space Invaders, where the goal wasn’t about watching the ending credits. However, if you beat the game on that difficulty level you’d wish the disk was rewriteable.