Shadow Company

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Review: Shadow Company

You command a team of up to eight hired guns (drawn from a pool of 16) as it makes its way through nine large, multi-objective missions that bring to bear force, cunning and stealth. Working from a malleable third-person view, you'll rescue, sabotage, transport, photograph and get nasty with an impressive range of weapons in locales as varied as Angola, Peru and Russia's Kola Peninsula. In between, you'll take instructions (in realistically imperfect full-motion video sequences), buy and sell supplies (right down to specific types of ammo), hire new mercs from the pool and watch the ones you've used successfully in the previous scenario gain points in 12 skills ranging from Assault Weapons to Stealth.

No single feature is responsible for Shadow Company's success. When it's at its most enjoyable (which is often), you'll find yourself taking pleasure in the wealth of touches lavished on the game by developer Sinister Games. You can drive vehicles ranging from trucks to cars to tanks to motorboats to tanks. The game camera (either bound to a merc or free-roaming) is both rational in that it allows you to see all terrain and buildings at all times, but obeys fog-of-war restrictions in omitting the people until you have someone close enough to see them.

The ambient sound is just masterful and it pays to keep the camera close to surface so you can hear it all: barking dogs, flowing water, laboring machinery, crunching footsteps--to say nothing of the wrenching screams of the wounded and theme music that suggests familiarity with "The Night Stalker." An "overwatch" mode allows the mercs to defend themselves without your intimate involvement--a problem in games like Commandos where enemy discovery of unattended troopers pretty much equals death. Mercs can stand, crouch and crawl and you can snipe, use binoculars and night vision goggles (but not move) in first-person. The enemy artificial intelligence isn't brilliant--guards did walk right by one of my guys while he was lying prone and halfway through the hole he'd cut in a fence--but generally observes a respectable blend of nonchalance and alertness.

When Shadow Company is less enjoyable, which is rare, you'll find yourself irritated by small flaws. While being able to drive vehicles is a plus--and being able to fire from a tank is a hoot--speed, traction and maneuverability seem similar from one vehicle to another and, improbably, some can scale and descend steep slopes. You can't examine a character's inventory when the character's in a vehicle and often even when within a certain range of it. Enemies have a tendency to vanish even when you should be able to see them (i.e. when you're in a bus). The game also allowed me to unload a passenger directly under a bus--the top of half of her body stuck in the chassis--and, natch, she died when it started up again.

Inventory isn't based on actual space, but on the configuration of free inventory boxes among the 12 available. (A medical kit takes four boxes, but the boxes have to be arranged in a square or you won't be able to pick one up.) Path-finding is solid, but, at greater distances, mercs often complained they couldn't reach places that they plainly could. If you order a group on a path that involves descending a ladder, they don't descend individually, but piggybacked on each other.

Ordered to secure a chemical storage facility, I found I couldn't attack an enemy who was standing in plain sight. I eventually had to drive a bus into the storage tank behind him, destroying it, to do him in. And clipping is occasionally an issue. A minute later, the same bus drove straight through a huge pipe.

But these problems were never fatal--Shadow Company locked up only once in a good 20 hours of play--and they never took over the game. Even now, they're receding into the past, leaving Shadow Company's light burning brightly.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro