It's always interesting to note the strengthening of sub-genres in PC gaming circles, and increasingly with First Person Shooters there's been a line drawn between fun and realism.

Traditional FPS games like Quake and Unreal Tournament consist of pure arcade-style blasting action, whereas more realistic games such as Medal of Honor or Counter-Strike feature real weapons, stealth tactics and deathmatch rules such as "you're dead - you stay dead". We can all recall the futility of trying to explain that rule to the other kids in class after you'd imaginary machine-gunned them to death at close range on a lunch break.

IGI 2 falls into this latter category and is what us learned games reviewing types have begun to call a "stealth-'em-up" - with the proviso that it doesn't go the whole hog with realism and it maintains a fun, Rambo-style aspect at times. Don't push me, indeed.

IGI is an acronym for the Institute for Geopolitical Intelligence, a covert operations unit to which you belong. Predictably, your missions involve snooping around enemy compounds and laboratories in order to steal microchips, documents and snow-shakers. Well, you need to take something back as souvenirs for the family.

Infiltrating these locations inevitably involves crawling around on your belly, avoiding guard patrols and security cameras. You can take people out, stealthily with silenced weapons, but should a guard spot you, or a camera see a dead body or anything else irregular, alarms will go off and half the compound will descend on your position.

It's still possible to finish missions by gunning your way merrily through hordes of guards - and indeed, some scenarios require this - and this is where the realism is lessened, although not to a damaging extent. In fact, the gameplay is pretty well balanced overall.

The atmosphere of realism is effectively conveyed thanks to some fairly clever guard AI. They're accurate and intelligent, taking cover when appropriate, lobbing grenades and so forth. Having said this, they can still be rather daft at times, particularly in small complexes of corridors and rooms where clumsy actions can prevail, such as casually waltzing into your line of fire. They do better outside and pitched gunfights here get the heart genuinely pumping, what with tracer fire whizzing overhead and grenades landing nearby.

Thankfully, the developers have introduced a save game system - you couldn't save during a mission in the original version, which was rather frustrating to say the least. The multiplayer is also well implemented, with a range of objective-based games and maps.

There aren't many negatives with IGI 2. The graphics aren't exactly cutting edge (although they're pretty enough), and it's also fairly machine-intensive, slowing down considerably at times on a mid-spec (1.2GHz Athlon) PC. Finally, the game's nothing new really, so if you're looking for innovation, IGI 2 comes up rather empty-handed.

Verdict
IGI 2 is solid, stealth-based shooter fare. While there's really nothing that could persuade you to pen a missive home about it, the game's well executed and designed, boasting 19 varied and challenging missions, balanced stealth-shooter gameplay and a pretty impressive multiplayer facet. Well worth a buy for wannabe covert ops types.

Company: Codemasters

Tags: first-person shooter counter-strike quake unreal tournament personal computer game arcade game game video game