Your squads move to waypoints that are assigned on the fly, moving from cover to cover, with a sticky waypoint marker that clings to handy objects like walls, abandoned vehicles, and fruit carts. These all have logical levels of destructibility, which is nice and adds some realism. Still, if any of your soldiers are stationed in a bad spot that doesn't provide as much cover as you'd like, they're not bright enough to get out of the line of fire on their own, and while controlling the situation in a panic it is nearly impossible to get that team to safety. What's more, you have to carry the wounded out manually, making two characters useless for every one that's wounded. As if the interface weren't enough of a struggle in these moments, the frame rate plummeting on occasion doesn't help any either.
Controlling the vehicles and marking areas for air strikes is as easy as point and click. The levels in the 12-mission campaign aren't set any place in particular, but bear a striking resemblance to the real world hot spots of the early 21st century. Everything is passable visually, but this is the PS2 we're talking about, so it's not going to win any beauty pageants, especially when put up against new releases like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.
Sound, on the other hand, is sharp, offering chaotic and dramatic elements in firefights, pumping up background music when things heat up, but also offering some entertaining banter between the troops when things calm down. Hearing a squad member invent some cheesy rap lyrics to break the tension, then his buddy tell him to shut the f*&# up fits together nicely.
Some co-op and adversarial online modes have been thrown in for good measure, offering a sort of Allies vs. Insurgents slant. The Allied warriors control just like they do in the offline mode, but the insurgents run solo but in greater numbers with the option of recruiting from the populace. Regardless of the differences, the play largely boils down to whoever gets spotted first. Meh.
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