Black Hawk Down Team Sabre Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Take control of a crack Delta Force team in this actioner. Unfortunately Chuck isn't with them!

Black Hawk Down is based on a number of things. There's the film, then the console and PC game and seeing as it seems to have Delta Force in the title, maybe a hint of Chuck Norris thrown in too (which can't be all bad).

It's basically an action game along the same lines as the Rainbow Six series and Splinter Cell series. Gameloft seemed to have this area of the market locked down (geddit) but Vivendi have thrown in their two pence worth.

You control a crack tactical team of Delta Force agents called Team Sabre and you have to rescue hostages and blow things up. The graphics are top down but contain a fair amount of detail. While 2D, the backgrounds are nicely rendered and there's plenty of colour. They suit the mood of the levels you're on with Iran looking fairly deserty (is that a word?) and Colombia pretty leafy. The animation is quite smooth although there is sometimes a little response time between shooting something and it actually blowing up. The explosions are nicely done and the helicopter sequences look pretty good.

The sound is really well put together with an intro tune that has a war time feel to it, and there are decent sound effects in the game! You get different sounds of gunfire, a clock ticking when defusing bombs and even the whine of a plane when seeing air strikes. Definitely an added experience to the game when you play with the sound on.

The controls are pretty decent although there is one fatal flaw. You control 3 different types of soldier for the main missions and you use the D or key pad to move them around. The zero button switches between each soldier and you can move them by moving the cursor (which should look like some feet) and then pressing the main button or 5 when it's where you want it to be. It's basically point and click. When you have the option of shooting something or performing an action, the cursor changes to either a target (for shooting) or a pair of clippers (for defusing bombs) and so on. The one drawback is that you can't group together these three team members and so you have to move each one individually. As some of the levels are pretty long this can become a bit tedious. In the helicopter levels, you just have to move the crosshairs around and the copter automatically fires. One thing to note is that the engineer type guy can replenish the team's health.

The game is a lot of fun to play. Like the other action games in this genre, there are different soldiers with different attributes. You get a rifle guy who has a lot of bullets and is quite well armored for close range combat, a sniper for distance shooting and an engineer for defusing bombs, calling in air strikes and replenishing health. The ground missions vary but always have two objectives. You either have to rescue people as your primary objective and then kill everyone as your secondary objective, or you have to blow things up as your primary and again kill everyone as your secondary. In fact, killing everyone is a sure bet to get through the game. In between these ground missions you get to play a cool helicopter mission where you fly around in a great big square taking out tanks, trucks with SAM missiles and also ground troops. You don't have to control the helicopter, it flies automatically, you just have to concentrate on killing everyone.

One of the best aspects of the game is that on the ground missions you have to use all the members of your team, especially in the later levels. You have the obligatory barrels you can blow up (to create chains of explosions) and also head shots with the sniper resulting in one hit kills. Plus when you run out of ammo you can use the knife although the animation for these isn't quite as good as other games and there's no silent kills. But there are quite a few bombs which only the engineer can see and as your viewing area is limited, you have to proceed with caution. Also the sniper seems to have vision equipment that allows you to scope out the entire level!

The missions can take quite a long time and there are quite a few of them. If you complete both objectives you get a medal as well as a score so there is some replay value in the game. Your progress is saved between each level, although it's slightly annoying that you can't save mid level as some of the levels can take up to half an hour to play through. But this is good as it means a lot of game time.

Overall a solidly put together game in the covert espionage mould which is fun to play and has good lastability.