The Regiment Review

Dirty dozen

The PM’s speech provoked an unusually hostile reception from backbenchers.

Working against tight time limits, you’ll rip through rooms in literally seconds with a sense that this is how the real SAS work. Slow-pokes won’t achieve the score necessary to unlock the next mission, as the grading system is largely based on highly efficient target times. There are four main scenarios, including the Iranian embassy siege and a terrorist takeover of Parliament, each consisting of three missions which are unlocked sequentially. In total, that’s 12 maps, with each lasting three to five minutes, that’s roughly 50 minutes of gameplay.

Of course, the odds of finishing every mission first time are about equal with the chance of randomly farting the tune to the Hungarian national anthem. It’s very much a case of locating a level’s danger spots and practising different methods of tackling them, then pulling off the perfect execution (there are no saves here). To begin with, it’s a buzz to get your tactics slick at such a speed. On your thirtieth-in-a-row crack at one of the harder missions, however, it’s about as much fun as chiselling your own kneecap off.

One tiny mistake at the end means you’ve got to do the whole bleeding lot again. Even worse is when a bug hits: a team-mate might have an AI wobble, lag behind the squad and get himself stupidly killed (a dead friendly equals major minus points - at least the terrorists have similar moments of standing dumbly still while you shoot them). You might be rushing a hostage to the level exit when they get stuck in a doorway. Even handcuffing hostages can lose you vital seconds as the context sensitive icon only registers when you hover the cursor over certain parts of the body, and those lost few moments can add up to you failing by a margin of one per cent, so it’s back to the start, or indeed, off for a nice calming cup of tea.

Arcade action

Kill them! Those travel cards expired last week!

Overly frustrated counter-terrorists can always switch the difficulty level from the default simulation to the arcade mode, which is somewhat easier, providing a more generous health bar and HUD aids such as a crosshair and ammo display. Or they can sign up for a stint in the multiplayer co-operative and "sabre team" modes (the latter being an interesting variant of team deathmatch which pits a small squad of better equipped SAS against a larger terrorist force). It’s still early days, but there are precious few servers running and some of these are plagued with lag spikes. This is probably due to the host’s slow machine and/or connection, but the half broken in-game server browser doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the net code.