Beyond the Law: The Third Wave

There's nothing exactly wrong with Beyond the Law: The Third Wave, it just never manages to work its way out of gaming mediocrity. The Beyond the Law: The Third Wave, is your basic real-time strategy stealth game. You control a group of specialists that you control from a top down perspective in real time.

The plot centers on a wave of gangs trying to topple the government and seize control of the United States. The game starts by explaining that a wave of petty crime, like bribery and blackmail, was the first to hit. The second involved prostitution, money laundering and drug cartels and that the third wave would be a nuclear attack of Washington, D.C.

The point of the game is to stop this third wave and take back control of the country. Before each of the game's 20 missions you're given a chance to hand-pick a team of specialists to carry out the objectives. You can choose between four types of characters, each with their own specialty. I found that the all-around, bodyguard, technical and sniper really didn't behave very differently. They do use different types of weapons, but the difference appeared superficial to me.

To prevent you from packing a bunch of high-end characters into you're team, you're required to spend money from a relatively small budget to hire them. Also, when they die in a mission they are permanently removed from your list. Once you've picked your team you head into the game itself. Unfortunately game play is spotty and uninspired as are the graphics - the sound on the other hand is, well it's intriguing.

The game requires a lot of pointing and clicking, as these sorts of games invariably do, but the action seems stripped down. You have to do a lot of sneaking around and avoiding both guards and cameras - but the hit-or-miss artificial intelligence of the guards makes this a difficult prospect.

One of things I appreciated about the game was that the characters all have a very, very limited supply of ammo - so it's virtually impossible to try and run-and-gun your way through levels.

The graphics are typical top-down so-so images, but the audio is dead on with characters all supporting different vernacular and accents. My favorite is the bodyguard who sounds like he's doing a dead-on impression of my uncle, an Italian from Chicago.

This game is a fair effort by a virtually unheard of gaming company - unfortunately it takes a lot more than that to get noticed in today's over-the-top gaming market. I'd like to recommend it, but I just can't.