Project IGI: I'm Going In Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)'Project IGI' is a cross between 'Goldeneye', 'Metal Gear Solid' and 'Delta Force'. As an ex-SAS, ex joyrider called David Llewelyn Jones (despite the name, he doesn't appear to be Welsh) you run around a series of modern battlefields, infiltrating installations, avoiding cameras and shooting things. In very nice 3D, with some huge landscapes that you can explore, if you feel like it. Like 'Delta Force', it's weighted towards action, and although a few well-placed shots finish off the bad guys, you are slightly less mortal. Nonetheless, you can be stealthy, and quite often it's much easier to avoid tripping the alarms (which you can turn off - best of all, you can just shoot the cameras). The graphics are attractive, if a little sparce. As in the song by The Who, you can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles, and some of the detail is superb - your weapons look and sound authentic, the explosions and ricocheting bullets are alarming, and you can't hide behind impenetrable cardboard boxes, because they aren't. After a while you notice that the graphics are sometimes quite spartan, and although the textures are high-quality, the interiors are often extremely bland. As with 'Delta Force', the bad guys seem to have built their bases from mass-produced kits, as individual buildings are copied and pasted verbatim from mission to mission, with only the furniture moved around to differentiate. There's some excellent modern James Bond-esque music, and the game itself is often extremely good fun - like 'Delta Force', but done well. But not that well. The plot tries for a James Bond ambience, but even with only 14 missions our hero seems to spend a lot of time escaping, being caught, and escaping again. The voice acting is very bad, too - our hero sounds like an enthusiastic primary school teacher, whilst his lovely assistant Anya has a California valley-girl accent that seems more Playboy bunny than government employee. I kept expecting her to use the word doofus, but she doesn't. Meanwhile, the supposedly Eastern European guards shout 'Hey you' and 'Stop' in English. The morality seems a bit iffy, too - you're basically a hired killer, and the bad guys aren't really bad guys, they're just guards in foreign, but non-hostile, military bases. It's as if you were a French soldier set down in Scotland, shooting down Scottish security guards. And yet, these are minor things. There are three major points that bedevil it - you can't save during a mission, at all; the missions are highly linear and scripted, in such a way that you absolutely have to play the mission several times over before you can complete it; and it's just not big enough. The decision not to include the ability to save a game is a brave one, shared with 'Aliens vs Predator'. The idea is to increase the tension by not allowing you to chicken out and hit F6 to quicksave, as with most other first-person shooters since 'Doom' (it's hard to remember nowadays, but until 'Doom' action games rarely let you save). It doesn't really work in 'Project IGI' - the size of some of the later missions, coupled with the fact that death is sometimes instant and unexpected, make it highly irritating. 'AvP' was eventually patched so that you could save a maximum of three times during a mission - a much better system. And the scripting is highly annoying. This is one of those games where you can explore an area and find it free of baddies but, if you press a switch, talk to somebody, or step over an invisible boundary, suddenly a truck-full of soldiers materialises from thin air. You can never really predict or guard against this, and quite often the missions become memory tests. One mission in which you have to escort a Russian businessman is particularly frustrating, and more than once I felt like burning the CD and posting it back to Eidos with a nasty letter. In general, the bits where you have to escort people (thankfully, only twice does this horrible game element appear) are dreadful - you have no way of knowing where they are, and they usually just stand there, waiting to be shot. And worst of all, it's too small. It has no fewer missions than 'Hidden and Dangerous', but a handful of them are extremely easy, and you'll finish them in no time. There is absolutely no replay value, either - the linear missions mean that once you've completed them, there's nothing to see if you play them again. And there's no multiplayer option at all. Fourteen missions and that's your lot. You'll play it for two or three days, get annoyed during the final, immensely frustrating, mission, and never play it ever again.

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