Project IGI (PC) > Reviews > Good game, crap title.

Author's product rating:   

Playability & Enjoyment	Excellent - very playable game
Graphics	Good
Sound	Good - relevant music & effects
Difficulty & Complexity	A difficult game - needs a lot of patience

Advantages:	Huge sized levels, decent graphics and sound, good range of weapons, more realistic than other games of this genre .
Disadvantages:	Crap A . I . , terrible building design .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

In Project:IGI (which stands for "I'm Going In" and will now be known from now on as IGI) you play David Llewellyn Jones, an ex-sas officer recruited by an anonymous counter-terrorist organisation to retrieve a stolen American nuclear warhead from what appears to be a Russian crime syndicate headed by members of the Pribori family. Jones is aided on this mission by Anya, an agent of the counter terrorist force who supplies him with mission updates and information.

The first mission requires you to infiltrate a small military base and steal some transport to get you to the next mission area (you only have to get to the transport, you don?t have to drive it to the next point).

IGI is a first person shooter (FPS), split into fourteen different missions, each of which advances the main story. Unlike some recent FPSs (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament etc.), and from what brief plot details I've given above you can guess that it's set in a real world environment. All of the missions are supposedly set in Russia somewhere, although I don?t believe the mission areas are accurately mapped.

You might be wondering why I've made a point of mentioning the mission areas, and not gotten straight into the game proper. Well, the truth is, these things are huge! The bases in the early stages of the game are around, say, 300m square, but the levels are way bigger than that! You could theoretically spend hours simply wandering around the landscape, although at the end of the day, this is pretty pointless because apart from the main base where your mission lies, there's nothing in the surrounding area. No patrols, no buildings and no hidden caches of equipment or ammo.

Despite their age, the graphics are excellent with the landscape looking quite real and the viewing distance is huge. The animation on the enemy soldiers and other characters you see in the game is smooth and realistic and the models of the guns you use are also well rendered and look good. If you have any trouble with the graphics on this game, as I did recently, try installing the most up to date drivers for your graphics card and make sure you're running the latest version of Direct X (a set of programs from Microsoft to enable better use of sound and graphics hardware and is currently version 9). Inside a base however, the maps are a slightly different matter. While I'm on the graphics, I might as well mention the sound which is quite good. Each gun has its own sounds and the ambient sounds are also excellent, adding to the already good atmosphere.

Like a lot of computer games, designers re-use things to reduce development time and storage. In this game, the corner cutting takes the form of buildings which are re-used. They have the same layout, and some have the same interiors! While it doesn't take away from the game, it would have been nice to see some variation in interior design or at the very least, some variation in the layout of some of the buildings.

The first mission will take you a few attempts to complete as you realise it's a lot more realistic than other FPSs that you may have played. All of the weapons behave in a more realistic manner than in other games. This means they have a wider cone of accuracy, and some vicious recoil. Again, this means that your first mission will probably see you die a few times as you get used to both the weapons and the limited amount of health packs in the game.

The AI of the enemy is a tad weird. A guard on look out has quite good AI, and if he spots you, he'll first activate the alarm before taking pot shots at you. However, guards on patrol rarely react to anything unless you?re standing right in front of them. If you use the sniper rifle and shoot one of a pair of guards who are standing beside each other, the other simply stands there until you shoot him!

That's not to say the game is frustrating, because it's far from it (although with the lack of a mid-mission save game facility, you do sometimes lose your temper when you're 30 metres from completing a mission!). What it simply means is that this is a FPS that has a far slower pace to it than other games like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Instead of running around, shooting people safe in the knowledge that a 200 unit health pack is around the corner, you creep slowly around the place, taking out soldiers one at a time hoping that you don't alert other guards, or get caught by a security camera.

Sometimes, I found it a bit difficult finding out what to do next. For example, (and some parts of this may be considered spoilers, so read the next paragraph at your own risk!) in one mission, I have to find some proximity mines, and then evacuate to the highest building in a deserted village, as well as keep an accomplice alive. It sounds fairly straightforward, doesn't it? Well, I thought so too! I did it backwards - I got the man to the evacuation point, then I could quite happily search for the mines without worrying about the guy getting shot. What I failed to realise was that he needed to be beside me at a certain point to activate a "switch" which would grant me access to the warehouses which contained the mines. Later in the same mission, I'm accosted by a tank! Now, I'm only armed with a pistol, machine gun and these mines. The logical thing to do is use the mines on the tank, right? After all, what's the point in getting the mines if you don't have to use them? Well, no! After wasting all my mines and ammo I spent 20 minutes running around trying not to get shot by the tank, when all of a sudden, I found a rocket launcher hidden in the corner of a building. One shot later and the tank was history. So, in this case, a few pointers from "Anya" wouldn't have gone amiss.

The main characters seem to be quite good and likeable, although the voice of the main character, Jones, is very annoying indeed. But you only get to hear his voice during the excellent pre-mission animations which give you the information for the mission you are about to undertake.

There is no multiplayer capability with this game ? it's a one player game only. While this is quite unusual for a FPS, it's not something I consider to be of utmost importance, although the game could be excellent as multiplayer.

One last factor I have to point out is the fairly high specifications of PC that you need to get anything out of this. The least I would suggest running this on would be a 600 Mhz CPU and 128MB of memory. Anything less than the specs I have mentioned and it will be quite unplayable.

The slow pace of the game, along with the lack of mid-mission saves, and increasing difficulty means that this is one game you're going to be playing for a long time indeed! It's been out for a few years now (the sequel, IGI 2, is already on the market), so you should be able to pick it up on a budget label for between five and ten pounds. I loved it, and would thoroughly recommend it. If you like your games to be faster paced, or "arcadey" then I would suggest you try the demo before you buy.