I can imagine that a developer
working on the low-visibilty Psi-Ops was, at some point, told that their game would never be any good. After all, Psi-Ops appears to be so generic that it would
get lost among established franchises like Metal Gear Solid and
Splinter Cell. Fortunately, the overachieving developers at Midway
wouldn't hear it. On the surface, there is absolutely nothing
remarkable about Psi-Ops. You play as Nick Scryer, an undercover
military operative, with amnesia of course, who's infiltrated an enemy
base. You start off with some weak weapons, and need to sneak around
and complete objectives given to you via comlink. Does any of this
sound even remotely original?
Your basic skills also aren't really anything new. Like Sam Fisher or
Solid Snake, Nick can crouch, flatten against walls, jump, climb
ladders, shoot, etc. This gives you the basics that you'll need to get
around, but again provide nothing new for you to do. When you're
sneaking around the first few levels, Psi-Ops is pretty dull.
Once you get past the initial tedium, you'll discover that you've
actually undergone treatments to have Nick's psychic abilities disabled
in order to infiltrate the enemy. Now that you're inside, your powers
and memory start coming back to you. This is where Psi-Ops gets good.
In fact, it gets very good. Your handful of pychic abilities all
provide you with the tools you'll need to devastate your enemies. You
can set them on fire, burst their heads to refill your pychic meter,
possess them, or simply throw them around like a rag doll. While each
of the skills are useful, you'll definitely get the most mileage out of
your telekinesis ability. It's great for solving puzzles or picking up
objects to throw at your enemies (or just picking the enemy himself
up). TK is also one of the coolest looking abilities I've seen in any
type of game. Simply playing around with it is very fun. You'll get a
lot of sick joy by using TK in innovative ways to slaughter your
opponents.
Overall, the graphics have some nice features that add up to create a
good looking game. The character models and environment graphics aren't
remarkable in any way, but I was astounded at the framerate. Psi-Ops
runs buttery smooth and didn't have any noticable framerate dips at
all. l also could tell that the developers put a lot of love into
designing the effects for each pyschic power. The visuals are right on
and often very impressive, especially for telekinesis which I mentioned
before. Character animation is impressive, too. When you release an
enemy from possession, he'll scream "Get out of my head!" and hold his
head like he has a massive migrane. Or, when you pick enemies up with
TK, they may fire wildly at you to shake you off. Those animations gave
the enemies a bit more personality and really added to the game. Dead
enemies use the obligatory rag-doll physics, so playing around with
dead bodies can be a bit of fun as well. The collection of these nice
graphical elements add up to create a good visual presentation.
Psi-Ops is an oddity in gaming and shows how talented this development
team is. They took the formula from dozens of identical "Third Person
Tactical Shooters" and put such a great and unique twist on it that the
game became something else entirely. While not the first game to
introduce pyschic powers to the mix, Psi-Ops integrates them so well
with the game and implements them so flawlessly that it's a game you
shouldn't miss.
