The Longest Day of Your Life

Welcome back, madcap Bonkers Loony Conspiracy fans! I'm in the library, about to finish off my Documentary Commentary for HIS124, and thought you all might like to read a small review I wrote about a certain game that came out on Friday for PlayStation2... if you're interested...

'24: The Game'

The Good:
- Amazing presentation: just like a missing season of 24
- Fantastic plot: inventive twists and turns exactly like the show
- The full 24 cast: everyone from Jack Bauer to Adam Kaufman act their socks off
- Superb variety of missions: never repetitive
- Well-realised world: explore a full-scale city on foot or by car
- Brilliant shooting: many weapons and approaches to a situation
- Fast-paced driving: physics created for big cinematic car chases
- Hacking mini-games: not as rubbish as they sound
- Music and sound: score by Sean Callery, plenty of bangs and booms

The Bad:
- Not the best graphics: not terrible either, but there are better looking games out there
- No co-operative multiplayer: imagine Jack and Tony working together...?
- Not actually real time: more like 14 than 24

The Review:
The following takes place between 6:00am and 7:00am...

An anonymous phone call from a public pay booth near the Los Angeles docks informs Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that a shipment of illegal weapons, plus a deadly ricin biotoxin bomb, has arrived. Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) leads a SWAT unit to seize the shipment and diffuse the bomb. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, DC CTU agent Chase Edmunds (James Badge Dale) is working undercover with a group of terrorists who are planning to assassinate Vice-President Jim Prescott in LA later on in the day. Blowing his cover to warn CTU in LA, he becomes a target of the people he's working with.

As the day progresses, Jack's daughter Kimberly Bauer (Elisha Cuthbert) starts her first day as a temp worker at CTU, and ends up working alongside Michelle Dessller (Reiko Aylesworth) when an enemy agent from Jack's past raids the building for a hard-drive containing information about their plans. Special Agent in Charge Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) stops a deadly ricin attack on a subway in LA before uncovering evidence that implicates Governor of California James Radford in the terrorist plot. A deadly earthquake, caused by a well-placed bomb somewhere underground, rips through LA. All the while, President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) recovers from the attempt on his life that occurred six months previous, trying to cope with the stress of the day's events.

You're now panicking about having missed a season of the excellent television show, 24, aren't you? Don't worry, you haven't. The above is the convoluted plot of '24: The Game', a superb PlayStation2 title that takes place between Season 2 and Season 3 and answers all of the questions that were left hanging after Palmer was seen dying in the street at 7:00am after the second longest day of Jack Bauer's life. Offering players the chance to step into the world of counter-terrorism in the high drama, high action and high suspense world of 24, this game is an unparalleled success.

There are three main modes of play that will confront your characters in '24: The Game'. Firstly, and predominantly, you control a character in a third-person shooter game. Missions ranging from stealthy infiltration without alerting guards, all-out assault on an enemy base, undercover missions where you must act naturally or be rumbled as a government agent or chasing a fleeing suspect through alleyways all come up in the course of the story. Mainly, you're Jack, running and gunning in his usual style, but often you'll play as another CTU agent: Chase, Tony, Michelle and even Kim are playable. In fact, one of the more interesting missions of the game sees Kim, who hasn't had weapons training, sneaking through a locked down CTU without any means of defending herself... incredibly tense, edgy movements and ducking behind crates have never been so loaded with excitement. Gunplay is the standard fare, with L1 targeting your enemy and R1 blasting them away, Circle performing a duck-and-roll move, X making you take cover behind walls or desks, etc. In fact, if you've ever played 'James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing' or 'From Russia With Love', you'll feel right at home. A nice addition, however, exclusive to '24: The Game' is the speech button. Far from being the catchphrase-reeling useless function of 'Terminator 3: The Redemption', this allows you to issue commands to the various characters you'll come across. Target an enemy and press R2, and your character will call out "CTU! Hands in the air!", and if they don't co-operate, a shot to the arm or leg will force them to drop their gun and raise their arms, leaving you to either handcuff them or snap their neck. Civilians in danger of being shot in a crossfire can be faced and told "I'm a federal agent, keep down!", and other characters following you can be instructed to "Wait here and stay covered!" or "Follow me, slowly!" This really adds to the interactivity of the gameplay and makes for tactical approaches to situations that would otherwise be very similar.

It's also a helpful feature in the driving missions. If you find yourself stranded without a car in '24: The Game', a quick tap of R2 will call out "Federal agent, I need this vehicle!" and allow you to commandeer a new set of wheels. The driving is one of the carefully thought out sections of the experience. The camera and driving physics have been tweaked to make sliding round corners and spinning your car very cinematic and over-the-top, just like 24 on television. There are the usual range of sports cars, saloons, SUVs and trucks to be had, and missions are usually timed dashes across town or carry the objective of tailing a suspect, mainly while fending off enemy vehicles that try to ram you off the road. A satisfying handbrake turn at the right moment will send them sailing off into a wall (resulting in a lovely big fireball of death), and this makes the driving sections rewarding.

Thirdly, computer-based mini-games pepper the action, usually taking place back at CTU headquarters. These are fun little segments of logical puzzle-solving: use a satellite to pinpoint enemies in buildings around Jack's location by their heat signatures, break into secured files using a scrambled code, pressing sequences of buttons, memory tests and a few mazes aren't as dull as they sound, especially since the famous 24 ticking clock is ever-present, adding to the layer of tension as you try to remember which path was blocked by FBI servers and which wasn't as you hack into secured files.

Admittedly, '24: The Game' isn't as pretty as it could have been. There are better looking games available on the market (mainly from EA Games), but having said that, it's not that big a problem. The graphics are good enough, the framerate slowdown (of which there is a little) is barely noticeable, all the cast likenesses are very accurate and the interactive environments are well-detailed. The atmosphere, suspense and storyline are so immersive that you buy the entire package and don't really question anything until you've beaten the final mission on board a luxury yacht and seen the final cutscene in which Jack... oh, no, I won't spoil it for you. As noted above in The Good, the music is provided by 24 and 'James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing' veteran Sean Callery, capping off that 24 feel to perfection, and the sound effects are all satisfyingly over-the-top, exaggerated roars, blasts and screeches of tyres.

The only two downsides that may sway your opinion of '24: The Game' are as follows: one, there isn't any kind of multiplayer. Sure, a deathmatch is out of the question based on the plot, but a co-operative selection would have been brilliant, having Jack and Tony storming a building or Jack and Kim trying to escape a terrorist base together, or one man hacking a satellite to call out sniper positions while the other picks them off...? Two, while it would be nigh-on impossible for a game (where the player has total freedom over his actions and therefore how long he/she takes) to be real-time, '24: The Game' is more like '14: The Game'. Each hour, made up of smaller missions, takes between twenty minutes and three-quarters of an hour to pass. You won't really care, and the jumps in time are covered well in the storyline, but as its 24...

Forget about the last paragraph, however, as '24: The Game' is literally amazing. We aren't talking genre-redefining stuff, but any fan of the show or any fan of action-adventure shooting games will simply adore kicking down doors and yelling "CTU! On the floor, now!" and travelling sideways round a corner before smashing through an alleyway filled with cardboard boxes at breakneck speed. '24: The Game' is everything you could ever want from a 24 game, and everything you could ever want from a 24 product or story.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get to play out your very own longest day.

The Score:
- Graphics: 8 out of 10
- Gameplay: 10 out of 10
- Length: 9 out of 10
- Value: 10 out of 10

Tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday, normal posting will resume. Take care, peace out!