SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs

Written by Chris Reiter  on November 18, 2003

Offline Review: Teaching grown men everywhere to "insert" and "deploy" inside four major bodies of the world!

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Sony's green, mean, army machines aren't through with their war yet -- and it's not the Gumby Patrol. I'm talking about America's Navy SEALs, men of courage, honor, and valor on so many different levels. These guys rank amongst the best of the best. Through small deployment units, SEALs kick terrorism ass all over the place, leaking in through the cracks of a threshold like insignificant spiders that attack unseen and unaffected however outnumbered their chances may be at times. Last year was a major turning point for the PlayStation 2, because SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs was Sony's first official tactical shooter online release for the system, and has since then become a home for the largest user community of players online for any video game console. Doubling their efforts, the makers of SOCOM, Zipper Interactive, turned and toiled and came up with a new lock on the very job SEALs pose -- bringing the world of gaming a new for everything anyone could've asked for in the first, and more.

Got terrorists, drug smugglers, or radical agents operating against you or your government? Call America's Navy SEALs today hassle free! The Navy SEALs are a squad of decorated soldiers highly trained and highly organized to face most any a peril. These guys are a four-man group, code named: Specter, the leader; Jester, the right-hand man; and Wardog and Vandal, primary team Alpha's Bravo backup. Using shadow, camouflage, and even various terrain elements for cover, SEALs will strike without warning and leave all in one fell swoop. Snow, rain, wind, night, or searing hot days, these guys will be there to help you rid the world of evil doers. So call SOCOM today -- they'll be waiting!

Take one highly anticipated online enabled squad shooter and add another year to that, and you get SOCOM II: U.S. Nay SEALs, the next combat mission for Sony's team of four guys against countless others. Make no mistake about it, it has been only a little more than a year since fans saw the last of what Zipper Interactive had in store for the PlayStation 2's flagship online launch release. You've got to wonder though...how much has really changed in just a year? For starters, you are no longer Kahuna, the first SOCOM's decisive coordinator. You are now Specter instead with Jester as your backup buddy; the same aliases used for the original's Bravo team (or, secondary tagalong guys). With Kahuna and Boomer sadly now MIA, Wardog and Vandal make up for the most of SOCOM II's Bravo outfit. What's in a name anyway? A trained soldier by any other name would kill just as swift. And in SOCOM II, you'll see name changing happening at different points in time too as British SAS and Russian Spetznaz members replace the hound and the disrupter periodically. In execution this adds a slightly otherwise experience to the mission-based mix, only because the new guys talk different, not play differently.

Exactly how each character operates is once again all wired through you, hot shot. You're a one man job giver to three others like yourself. You're the clock, and they're the hands. You're the palm, and they're the fingers. You're you and what you do is say whatever they do. Together with Jester, your pairing in this four-man marching band is called Alpha. Jester's with you all the way until Sunday. He's the only guy that will follow you anywhere, because two is better than one, and in total you've got four shades of gray working on your side. As for the remaining quartet, their job is to perform the most direct of orders. Once more, your range of options for how to take the best course of action against any foe is a hefty lot. By way of the tactical map again, each level's layout (12 in all) specifies objective locations through use of icons. Each section of the map is also divided up by letter call signs, or in army talk Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Juliet, Romeo, Whiskey, and Zulu. Telling your men to attack to any of these destinations, and they'll start hustling, pointing their gun at anything in sight. Tell them to stealth to an area, however, and they'll use a better means of cover to protect themselves from harm.

Fighting every which way until the end of each level with only four men against dozens of others isn't as easy as it sounds, though. Terrorists fight back, so using commands wisely is always the best way to do things. Say a door stands between you and a room encased with terrorists. You could open the door yourself and risk the chance of being fired upon, or you could instead tell your team to open the door and breach the area with explosive, blinding light, and pull the trigger kind of results. Depending on what each mission has in store for your overall strategy, selecting choice directives aside from what will obviously get your team slaughtered are usually the best path to make each insertion and extraction a winner. One mission for instance has the SEAL team in need of locating a drug lab, to demolish it, and then make sure the bad guys don't escape from within your grasp. If, however, the river bank outposts manage to spot you on your merry trail way there, an attack helicopter will be deployed to your location in no time. The drug lab is also well hidden within the level, meaning the best road to its position is tagging behind one baddie who just might know the way. Combining stealth with precision sniper abilities, this mission can be completed easier if done the right way, or lost quicker with every wrong turn.

While mission objectives this time are separate from the first SOCOM, you can't help but feel that some of them are relatively the same as from last year's endeavors. To say that's bad, it's not. New to the SOCOM series are introductory, worldly destinations (Algeria, Brazil, Albania, and Russia) and fixed weapons you can now man (i.e., turrets) that pose a different means of tackling the many men and women who aren't on your side. The thing is though that placing bombs to destroy significant enemy elements, escorting restrained subjects through heavy fire, neutralizing a barrage of terrorists and their leader(s), or even diffusing multiple bombs has all been said and done already in the original SOCOM release. Just about the only thing keeping SOCOM II's offline portion fresh is the order in which finishing every remixed goal is made.

Putting your team through the pitfalls of war is one thing, but would you want yourself to struggle as well? I didn't think so. SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs offers a list of dissimilar control styles (4 of them) that allow you to choose the best way to guide your main man through one firefight after the next. Mainly the same, although unique in some way or another, the control pattern for every scheme is altered between each play pattern in such a way that whether you prefer a combination such as strafing/moving with the left analog while aiming with the right, or switching the strafe options to the back buttons, there's a mixture of mastery mannerisms here that should leave enough room open for any one person to make up their mind. However, figuring out how to be a Navy SEAL in this combative title will usually take newcomers about 20-30 minutes to get well adjusted to any one particular control choice. Every button has its own purpose. By knowing you've got to be able to shoot, jump, bark orders, peek around corners, or even activate special commands (from opening a door, picking up a fallen enemy's weapon, and restraining the criminal kind), a lot is involved in doing a service to your country.

The worst part about working with a Navy SEAL team, however, is that sometimes they just don't want to listen. Last year the same glitch popped up in the original SOCOM, and in this year's it's happening all over again. Your three other teammates are always good at what they do, except when it comes blending into various terrain parts. Jester is always with you, and at times the Bravo boys never stay too far behind either. Generally, this "sticking together" combo causes your team to crowd up, and to make things harder for you to navigate past the others when adjoined in tight corners. At some point you're bound to have happen one moment when you climb up a ladder where the platform above can't support an entire SEALs formation no matter how few of them there are, provoking one or more to fall off and injure themselves when even one of the three manages to merge all. These repeating cloddish behaviors not only cause harm and sometimes death to these men, but losing the efficiency points of your team's mission accuracy won't fare so well when it comes to grading time.

As realistic as the feeling of working your own Navy SEALs team like the Wardogs they are last year was, the look of the experience consequently suffered with an outdated unbalance in its visual force. Surprisingly, Zipper Interactive took the initiative to update every visual bit of the game for its sequel. SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs does look better than its degraded quality predecessor, albeit not as much as one would hope for. If only by its somewhat stale attention to its widespread appearance alone, SOCOM II doesn't offer any groundbreaking or envelope pushing material to justify its means as one of the highest quality releases across the PlayStation 2's board. Despite that lesser trait value though, SOCOM II is still a remarkably believable world of good guys and bad meshed together. People models are sharper than before for one thing, not only with improved textures to make individuals stand out better, but also with multiple apparels. Not the entire crew always dresses up the same way, as Specter and Jester might have helmets on while Bravo gears up in dark wetsuits and masks, showing off continuous variations throughout each chapter in this war story.

How they flow, how they move, how SEALs and terrorists collide together through animations has looked and still looks good in practice. Actions your attack squadron takes make everything appear close enough to the way in which a SEALs team operates, whether they're standing tall, hunched over and sneaking through shadows, or hitting the dirt, belly flat, and crawling for cover from a storm of heavy resistance. Approach an enemy, and Specter or any of your other teammates will automatically point their guns toward any hostile, leaving just yourself to follow with drilling the s.o.b. with your own fire rate down. Terrorists in association with your vacuum crew in cleansing the world of their dirt act like, well...terrorists, in how they'll walk about, patrolling their posts, and then hunching over and heading your way if you shoot them in the chest. Shoot one in the head opposite of that, and they'll react with a prone position, falling to the ground below them right where they belong.

What good is a jungle, a train yard, or a corrupter of the peoples' palace if they don't take a page out of life? Those antiquated SOCOM stages of old have been redesigned with healthier measures in mind. Foliage spreads across a serene autumn tree-filled route (with plant life that actually bends when you touch it this time) into a not so peaceful position of blowing the enemy's stockpile all to hell in Albania, while Algeria shares narrow passages and wide-open spaces displaying wreckage from collapsed structures and war-torn streets in its desert locale. Had you ventured through the first SOCOM before, you'd be correct in second-guessing that SOCOM II drags its feet out from being in the open all day long and into some urban territory for the first time. Just like the aforementioned city streets of Algeria right down to a slumsville in Brazil, the SEALs will take part in a lot more action through enclosed areas, as opposed to the several outdoors posts the last game chose to showcase, making for a most welcome change. Through these areas and others, the effects taking place on the screen mark their rightful placement with all the glorious guns lighting up when entering rapid fire mode, snow or rain, and day or night occurring in their respective moments in a spectacle of highlights, and the luscious new green night vision and blue and orange infrared shades perpetuating a weapon's ranged focus in lovely colors.

Being a SEAL and all, the ideal thing to do is actually look like a SEAL amidst the many shooting and the sneaking tactical situations you will encounter along the way. While not everyone is privileged enough to be able to borrow their daddy's old army uniform and dress up like a commando in front of their TV set, the next best thing is to attach a microphone to your head for a linkup to the rest of the team just as SEALs do in real life. Sony had shipped SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs with its own USB headset last year, but unfortunately, that's not the case for the sequel. If you're lucky enough to still own a copy of the last SOCOM title and its Logitech-made peripheral, then all you need to do is plug it into the front port of the PlayStation 2, and allow yourself to say the things you want to those Three Stooges you call backup to do instead of pressing the controller button a few times every time. But if you're that someone who doesn't own your own copy of the original SOCOM, various headset models compatible with the PlayStation 2 system are always available in stock (prices varying from $30-$50). And if that doesn't work, there's always the controller.

Thankfully you don't have to sound like a gruff dude or even be one to receive tons of terrific voice over responses through your headset, or without one. Increasing the ante on everything your team says on the field, more witty commentary, more army-type talk, and even lengthy dialogue scenes between patrol personnel add a bit of depth into the many different things every character can and will tell you. In times of pressuring the enemy to drop their defenses, your SEALs will literally shout out convincing phrases such as, "Get down! Put your hands in the air, now!" Or if they just want to showboat with their kill count, they'll tell you, "That one's not getting up!" There'll also come times when the SEAL team is triggered in a number of different dialogue moments to an extent of something as even with the situation in that part of the world being critical, they wouldn't mind spending off time there. Personalities also develop around the terrorists more (with subtitles aplenty; authenticity requires the native languages of each country being put to good use, and it shows), so that just before you rush into slaughtering them, you'll get an outlook on their thoughts about each other, their leader, or in general a tongue lashing to hunt the hidden ones that are coming their way -- you know who.

Entailing the SEALs through thick and thin, music pilots the way to war in the orchestrated symphonic of ways. Getting quiet as a mouse and out of sight of hostiles, the sound pitches itself down, keeping a low profile just like you and the ones that follow. Engage an enemy or enemies on the other hand, and all of a sudden the subtle rhythm runs out the back door crying and in soars the intensity of miscellaneous instruments blaring the best they can in an alright by me opus. At those same moments of vigor, all you've got between you and death is a gun in which each type fires off rounds only identifiably valid as real life makes them. Punch a hole through the head of random lookout member number 370 with a silenced automatic, and a pop emanates from the wall right behind him (or her). Pick up a louder automatic and then scan the entire outline of a level with it in blood, and a lot different effect will follow that's like a dentist drilling a tooth, only noisier and redder. Noise shifts in forms of traversing grounds too. Slide on your stomach on a concrete surface, then some silent shuffling tails from behind as the SEALs in the back of you do the same thing. Stand up and run from crunchy leaves into a bed of splashing water however, and the height of the calm will increase dramatically.