Secret Service

"Possibly one of the more boring shooters out there (contains minor spoilers)."

Whenever I play a fresh new game, I worry about whether it'll be bad, good, boring, or exciting. But I always try to remain optimistic, to praise whatever good lies within, or to heavily critique the bad stuff. But this is the first game I've ever played where I literally asked myself, “when can I stop playing this?” Why did I ask myself that? Because it's incredibly boring.

Before I get into the story, let me clarify a couple things. One, this game takes place in the US, but has fictional people and places involved. Two, this game is NOT endorsed by the United States Secret Service (it says so right on the box). Here's the story: for the past 10 years, the United States has been in conflict with the nearby nation of Costa Sentava. The main issues are about foreign policy, oil, and biological weapons (mainly CVX gas, whatever that is), not to mention the fact that they have a nasty habit of oppressing their people. The year is 2009, and the president, in cooperation with the president-elect, has decided to allow two million Costa Sentavan refugees into the country (a guaranteed recipe for disaster).

You play as Agent Pierce, a rookie just given his first assignment of watching over the president alongside a team of agents for a press event at the Lincoln Memorial. All of a sudden, Costa Sentavan terrorists attack, the president is wounded, and you're sent on a “kill enemies, and snipe RPG units” objective. During the games' second mission, Pierce finds out about a CVX gas attack planned for the city and needs to tell the president. But the president has died from his wounds, and “protocols” and “procedures” prevent him from telling the president-elect, so he must inform him by any means necessary. It's just a horrible cliche.

Bad story aside, this is a very basic first person shooter. You can carry two weapons and some grenades at a time. Weapons are a broad range of pistols, automatics, and shotguns. When you take damage, the screen will start to fade to black, and will zip right back to normal if you don't take any damage for a few seconds. You can lean from corners and shoot at enemies (and pick up/switch out weapons from the fallen). It's all very basic stuff, nothing new.

There are a couple things which make this shooter different from others, but not for the better. One is your melee attack; you don't have one. Whereas enemies will smack you with their gun when you get close, you have a stun gun. Yes, a stun gun. At times you would be better off just shooting the guy with an easy headshot, because the stun gun is hard to hit with (it does become useful if you practice with it, if you really want to take the time to do that). The second is hacking, which is a minigame. This has to be the most aggravating part of this game. During missions there is at least one computer or bomb that needs to be hacked. Here's how it works, there is a square grid with four types of blocks: power sources, wires, chips, and weak chips (which are colored red). Within the time limit, you need to rotate the blocks so that power from the power source connects to the wires, and then to the chips. You succeed if all the chips are activated and fail if you run out of time or activate a weak chip. If you fail on a bomb you die, and if you fail on a computer, you have to try again. In both instances, the next grid will be different from the last. This minigame wouldn't be so frustrating if there was just a little more time to do it. The clock ran out on me countless times when all I had to do was make one more rotation.

The game isn't 100% terrible. It looks okay, there is nice weapon diversity, and the enemy AI is competent, though with a few flops here and there. But there is one thing that makes this game worth renting, and that's the achievements. If you're an achievement hog and you're good at shooters, this might be worth a day of your life. Just play through the game on Normal difficulty and you'll get 25 points per completed level. There are also 10, 15, and 20 point achievements for doing completely mundane things (such as walking into an electric fence 15 times or killing a certain number of enemies with pistols).

The bottom line is that this is a run-of-the-mill first person shooter with nothing special, marred by the gameplay issues; it doesn't even have multiplayer. Like I said, it's only worth playing for the achievements. Otherwise, you'll get bored really fast because there are already better shooters out there.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/08, Updated 12/08/08

Game Release: Secret Service (US, 11/04/08)