WinBack: Covert Operations

"A good game... for rent."

First off, ''Winback: Covert Operations'' is a great game. Yes, a great game: to rent. This game won't last very long. It's very short, and extremely repetitive. Every mission is the same ''hide-behind-the-wall'' and ''shoot-the-bad-guy.'' It doesn't even have any objectives like classics, GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. The only thing you do is to get to the end of the level. Very, very linear. VERY.

The controls are one of the best I've ever seen for the third-person shooting genre. No wait, I mean terrible. Yeah, terrible is what I meant. The controls is a clear copy-off of ''The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time,'' by using the C-Down as an alternative to the Z-Targeting system.

The aural portion is downright horrible! For every single level, is the same monotonous background music. And when your health meter goes down, the music just gets worse and worse! I don't know if the developers planned this to get you to try to get more health, but it still sucks. The sound effects leave something to be desired, too. This is a very small game. And that leaves if open for more stuff to be crammed inside the cartridge. What am I talking about? Voices. Yeah, all that is done during dialogue is text. Their movements are exactly like how they should be, portraying anger, etc. Likewise, so should their voices. In which they don't have any voices! Arghh....

The graphics are not mind-blowing. But then again, this game doesn't utilize the expansion pak. Just simple, straight-forward, graphics. I even believe that PlayStation could make better graphics.

This game is pretty easy to learn. If you just go to the Tutorial zone first, you should get all the basic manuevers. However, my rental did not come with a manual, so it took me a few hours to realize that when you are locked onto an enemy with C-Down, if you press C-Left or C-Right, the lock will transfer onto another enemy on the screen.

Replay value? What replay value? The second, third, and all levels beyond that are the same as the first. There are no gun upgrades or something. In Perfect Dark, well, THOSE is the kind of guns we want. In Winback, you only have 5 guns. And they all SUCK.

Overall, this is a good game to rent at your local Blockbuster. If you want to buy it, fine, that's your own $60. But I think it'd be wiser to actually rent it for about $5 and get the same stuff.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/12/00, Updated 11/12/00