Park as she sneaks, alone, into enemy strongholds at night to commit acts of pre-battle sabotage. But in a game that wears “tactics” on its sleeve, it’s disappointing to see the bad guys acting like paper targets.ĪI becomes less of a concern during SOCOM 4’s stealth missions, however. That isn’t to say they aren’t tough, or that they don’t present a challenge – they are and they do, and given how low your bullet tolerance is, even the stupidest enemy can kill you quickly. Sometimes, they’ll take cover and try to stick together, but it’s more common for them to run out into the open and take potshots until you shred them with machinegun fire. Granted, you could have avoided the situation by laying out a short path for Gold team using multiple waypoints and a delayed command, but having to babysit squadmates to that degreeisn't a great selling point for a tactical shooter.Īs shaky as your partners’ intelligence is, your enemies are arguably worse. At that point, using them as a distraction while you (still hidden) flank the guards might seem like a good strategy, but no - once the guards know where one of you is, they know where you all are, and they tend to prefer shooting at you to shooting your squadmates. It’s not always your fault, however you might try to order Gold team to sneak up to a high vantage point to silently snipe some guards, only to cringe as they crouch-walk into full view of the enemy on the way. Likewise, if you try to tell your squadmates to focus their fire on a specific target during a firefight, don’t be surprised if they go dashing into the enemy’s line of firebefore you can call them back. For example, if you want your team to move to a piece of cover in the distance, you’d better make sure you’re aiming precisely at that cover point, or you might accidentally order them out into the open. The problem is that it doesn’t always work. And even if you aren’t setting up an elaborate ambush, it's pretty useful tobe able to assign a team to guard the area behind you, or to silently take down a sentry. When it works right, this can be awfully damn rewarding, making you feel like some kind of badass tactical genius. Of course, nobody really plays SOCOM for the story, but if the aim here was to draw in more casual fans with a deeper plot, it would have been nice to see Zipper put forth more effort to make it interesting. In the end, though, none of it really matters the characters, conversations and story twists are thinly developed, forgettable and peppered with occasional laugh-out-loud clichés (“You and I are very much alike, Commander,” seriously?). Park (usually referred to as “Forty-Five”) over the suicidal nature of their mission. It gets a little more complicated than that, and the game tries to inject some drama by creating friction between OpsComm and the Koreans’ female officer, Lt. After teaming up with two South Korean stealth operatives, OpsComm decides on the only sane course of action: finish NATO’s mission by almost single-handedly putting down the insurgency and arresting its leader. Like most other games in the franchise, SOCOM 4 is a third-person tactical shooter – shorthand for “you have a squad to order around, and a couple of well-aimed shots can kill you.” Centering on Operations Commander Cullen Gray (who’srarely referred to as anything other than “OpsComm”), SOCOM 4’s campaign focuses on a small squad of elite NATO troops who find themselves cut off from nearly all support during an insurrection in a small Southeast Asian country.
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