SOCOM US Navy Seals: Tactical Strike review (PSP)

I'm still reconciling myself to the idea that real-time strategy is possible on a console. It's a tough season to live in denial on this front, with the likes of Halo and Final Fantasy donning monocles and reading Tacitus before bed, but I've yet to see the genre work credibly without keyboard and mouse (yes, I'm aware consoles support these peripherals but frankly that's cheating and you're missing the point and I never liked you anyway).

SOCOM US Navy Seals: Tactical Strike is the latest salvo in the war on my misgivings. Unfortunately for me it does a hell of a lot right, and on a handheld to boot.

Rather than the running and gunning of previous SOCOMs, Tactical Strike handles much like a third-person Full Spectrum Warrior. You control a pair of two-man teams, Alpha and Bravo, and are tasked with guiding them across nine expansive single player maps, liberating hostages, photographing smuggled weapons and capping moustachioed insurgents. There are logs and crumbling walls aplenty for the cowering behind, and cower behind them you must, for your men are as durable as ballet dancers in a sumo wrestling match.

Shark Sandwich

The plot is a regular ham and Gorgonzola sandwich of Eastern European stereotypes and militaristic acronyms, and is unexcitingly conveyed by way of FMV sequences and mission briefings. Suffice to say an Ambassador has got himself kidnapped (diplomats are notorious for this- you might as well have Princess Peach on the books) and your gang of sharp-shootin' stubbleheads has been paradropped into Bogeymanistan to save his bacon.

Mission briefings also allow you to customise your load-out and indulge in some RPG-lite stat development, buffing up skills like toughness and accuracy. Then you pick your insertion point (each map has one initially, with more becoming available on replay) and it’s off we pop to explosively redesign some drug baron’s patio.

Tactical Strike is very much one of those games you have to persevere with till something 'clicks'. The rotating third-person camera (assigned to the analogue nub) feels claustrophobic and awkward at first, and while the (optional) tutorial level renders everything more or less transparent, the menu-driven interface hinders swift response when the bullets start to fly.

Wrestling with controls

Which is not to say the game doesn't make effective use of the PSP's infamous controls. Right and left trigger allow you to flick between Alpha and Bravo viewpoints. Movement objectives are assigned by way of a 'skimmer' cursor, dropped onto the landscape with the circle button and controllable thereafter with the nub, while most offensive actions are activated by sliding your targeting reticule over the relevant unsavoury individual and calling down a menu with the X button. More punishing alternatives like grenades and sniper rifles can be accessed by holding square, and the triangle button handles medipack usage and regrouping. The D-pad provides you with three levels of zoom.

Once you’ve wrestled this plethora of options into submission, things pick up markedly. While the camera denies you an overall view of your enemies and the environment, the game feels far more challenging, even- whisper it- realistic as a result, and you'll quickly learn to compensate for your cramped vision by paying close attention to your troopers' radio alerts. Visible tangos are clearly marked on your HUD and minimap, and if scrambling your troops to cover is never entirely intuitive, the enemy AI is so unadventurous that you can usually take your time plotting a counterattack.

How smart?

Given the player's indirect role in the proceedings, Tactical Strike was always going to succeed or fail on the strength of each team member's behavioural routines. Fortunately, this one of the game’s stronger points. While you determine overall positioning, your troops will make independent use of their immediate surroundings. Send them into the vicinity of a wall and they'll press against it; deploy them near an arch and they'll take cover behind each pillar. The game indicates where each individual soldier is likely to position himself with a 'ghost' whenever you let the skimmer rest.

Other than a certain regrettable tendency to seek shelter in thin air unless directed otherwise, your band of brothers also handle themselves pretty well under fire. If their stealth is compromised while edging towards an objective they'll break into a run. If jumped, they'll retaliate and reload without prompt, retaining self-restraint enough not to pop a cap in a buddy's ass should you unwittingly walk him into the crossfire.

Comfy shoes

The enemies are rather less responsive. They’re sufficiently human to scatter at the sight of a grenade and fall prey to flanking manoeuvres, but there are the usual AI bugbears of poor hearing, hamster vision and a general reluctance to venture more than a few feet from a spawning point. This, as previously noted, is somewhat to Tactical Strike’s advantage: greater aggression or perceptiveness on your adversaries’ part might have compounded the clunky nature of the interface to make the game almost unmanageable.

On the other hand, without any real pressure from hostile troops the gameplay settles into slightly too comfortable a rhythm- draw a bogey’s fire with one, stationary team, surprise him from a different angle with the other- though you can always dive into the bulky infrastructure multiplayer component, replete with its own maps, clans, leaderboards and friends lists. Fleshy opponents (of which you can take on three at once) are naturally far less predictable than their computerised counterparts.

Rendezvous point

In terms of its visual aesthetic Tactical Strike is more than a little hackneyed, but technically solid and quite polished. The gold star (Victoria Cross? Purple Heart?) has to go to the modellers and animators. Part of the play satisfaction comes from simply watching your men carry out your orders with military aplomb: tell Alpha team to cover Bravo's advance and you'll see the lead Alpha signal by chopping the air vigorously with one hand, then lean out of cover and train his impressively authentic rifle on the horizon (draw distances are respectable) as the other team scurries past his elbow. There's the odd graphical glitch- the camera managed to get stuck inside a staircase at one point- and your men have a miraculous ability to run through each other, but on the whole this is not a title to make you tilt the screen away from fellow commuters in embarrassment. Providing you don't mind being thought of as a closet gun fetishist.

There are a couple of poor design choices. In an unfathomable nod to the abysmal SWAT: Target Liberty, the skimmer is subject to the same physical constraints as the character models, obliging the player to navigate it around the more cluttered environments like Pac-Man around his maze. It's also a bit unforgivable, after year upon year of Metal Gear Solid derivatives, to cook up a tactical action game with no sneaky corner view: when traversing some of the interior levels, I found myself frequently running my boys into an unanticipated fusillade.

Such niggles aside, this is a finely-poised slice of real-time tactical action. Tactical Strike won’t pry you away from the likes of Company of Heroes, and series purists may lament the loss of direct control, but it stands foremost of its genre in the handheld arena.