Bang bang, oh.. I'm dead..
Invariably, you’ll find yourself in a firefight, in fact, in a couple of places the game forces you into one. The start of the second level sees you blasting through some gates on a skidoo, hardly Mr Stealth there, and attracting a load of guards who then start peppering you with bullets. I love a good shootout as much as anyone, but the AI again has the upper hand. Even on easy mode these guys are crack shots. White Fox, for all his super abilities can’t crouch other than the ‘hunch’ he assumes for creeping, so taking cover is a bit of a problem. The aiming works along the lines of being more accurate the longer you hold the crosshair on a target, so you’ll often find yourself taking damage while waiting for the crosshair to zoom in…and wait you must because even a complete, un-aimed clip from a machine gun won’t take down one bad guy. This wouldn’t be so bad if White Fox was more resilient than he is, but this guy can only take four or five hits before it’s game over. So with no ducking option and being forced to put yourself in harm’s way for an inordinate amount of time, the action part of the game leaves something to be desired.
Things don’t improve much in firefights in open ground either. The AI does sensible things like take cover or run away when hurt, but even White Fox’s top running speed is still a gentle trot and not nearly quick enough to get you out of trouble before you’ve taken critical amounts of damage. And unless you can keep that crosshair on the bad guy’s head whilst strafing across his line of fire, you won’t have a hope of hitting him hard enough back, so you’re forced to leg it for what cover you can find and hope you have enough of the sparsely scattered med-kits to heal yourself before taking him on again.
The weapons you’re given are the usual mix of modern day arms, with knives, pistols, machine guns and sniper rifles along with gas grenades, sonic grenades and rolling sound emitters. All standard stuff really and the weapons, to be brutally frank, suck. The sniper rifle is easily the most useful weapon to have but ammo is scarcer than rocking horse poo. The sub-machine gun is next to useless, even in a big firefight as it’s accuracy is completely out of it so you'll just spray bullets all over and not hit a thing. You’d be best off just using the pistol and lining up for one shot kills all the time… that’s if you can stay alive long enough.