3D shooter full of over-excessive sidekicks

Tired of fighting bug-eyed monsters from outer space? Is it starting to make you feel a little like the robot from Lost In Space? (Danger Duke Nukem! Danger! Danger!) Well, in this first person shooter, the threats are all earth based. In fact, the oddest thing you will have to contend with is a genetically engineered mutant or three.

In this game, you will play one out of a choice of three characters out to stop a madman with a terrorist army under his control. Your background, and thus the missions, are military in nature, although you really work for corporate sponsored security forces, so for each you will get primary and secondary objectives, which may change as the mission progresses. Your job is to find the source of a new drug that has hit the streets and eliminate it. Along the way, of course, you will find new weapons, face new enemies, solve puzzles, track down the bad guys, and generally cause a lot of mayhem and destruction.

These days it's not good enough for a first-person shooter to have a solid single-player experience, you also have to deliver the goods on the multi-player front. (A little Unreal multi-player anyone?) Thankfully, SiN delivers a solid multi-player game that has all the fast paced action gamers demand. The weapons nicely balanced, with the all-mighty head-shot reigning supreme. The most welcome addition has to be the sniper rifle, with its powerful slug and zoom mode. (In the future, if a game doesn't have a sniping weapon, I'm not even going to waste my time.) The actual DeathMatch levels are well designed, ranging from a moving train to a room where everyone is two inches tall and you can use a mousetrap as a springboard.

The graphics in the game are a nice step up. The demo starts with your approach by helicopter to a bank the bad guys have taken over. One difference you soon see between SiN and other first person shooters is the targeting. It seems to make a real difference where you shoot the enemy. Shoot him in the leg, and he will still be in the game. Get him in the head, and he'll likely go down for good.

Other nice features make this game stand out. The enemies act almost realistically, looking for cover, or dropping in from the roof on ropes for a surprise attack. It makes for a very realistic feel.

Overall, SiN is a great deal of fun. The dialog between the characters is nice and corny, Blade's one-liners, such as "I'm going to make you my bitch!" hearken back to the Duke, and the end-boss is one serious ass-thumper. What more could you want from an action game?

-- One minor note, on a Pentium 200 mmx (without a graphics accelerator), the demo runs slowly, and I did hit sound problems, although I'm not sure why. Switching to a Pentium 400 with graphics accelerator made a huge difference, however, and the game looked good.