SAS: Secure Tomorrow

The Good
SAS Secure Tomorrow is one of the best budget shooters I've played in a long while. The game uses F.E.A.R.'s Jupiter EX engine, so for a budget game, it is pretty to look at.

The levels are well designed with lots of destructible objects and side rooms to explore (which may or may not contain more bad guys) and enough scripted events to make you feel like you are part of a larger assault.

You are given two invulnerable computer controlled team mates who are actually able to pull their own weight. You are the junior member of the team, so you can't order these guys around (though I wish you could).

The weapons are all real world ones. You can pick up the weapons of fallen enemies, though you are restricted to four weapons at any one time (luckily, your primary weapon can be modified into a sniper weapon, so in a way you can carry five weapons).

Those well designed levels and realistic weapons (along with smart friendly and enemy A.I.) make combat a blast in this game. Everything I wrote above was just sort of a lead-in to say how much fun the protracted gun battles are in this game. Enemies (and friends) will dodge and use cover and toss grenades at you (well, your friends won't grenade you).

Occasionally your squad will 'stack up' outside a door to be breached. When the door is forced, a soldier will toss in a flash bang grenade and it is up to you to charge in and clear the room. (While the flash bang has stunned the bad guys everything moves in slow motion.)

I also want to give kudos to the game designers for willing to be so over the top. The battles are extremely violent with blood splashing everywhere and your soldiers will drop the F-bomb at any chance they have. For once, it was nice to see a game designer say 'Screw the T rating!'

Also, the dialog in the game is surprisingly well written. Though the story is sort of your standard 'Take down these terrorists' FPS fare, the dialog is pretty good.

The Bad
The biggest hurdle I had with the game was your health. There isn't any. Rather, your character has the Wolverine like ability to auto heal if he stays out of the action for thirty seconds or so. I didn't like this at all. It felt like it made the game less of a challenge (though some firefights are so intense, you will die regardless).

I mentioned above that you could often explore extra rooms. I wish they would have put health packs in some of those rooms and given me a health bar. That way I wouldn't go into every battle in tip-top shape.

Aside from that complaint, everything else is minor.

Your squad mates could get in your way during firefights.

Throwing grenades through an open door was kind of clunky and difficult.

The ending was sort of a let down. You track down one terrorist and take him down and then a couple of cutscenes play taking care of the rest of the story. Those cutscenes could easily have been turned into another location and a couple more levels.

The Bottom Line
The game is pretty short. You should be able to finish it within two or three hours. But then it is a budget game. You can now buy it for less than the cost of a movie ticket and man, what a couple of hours you will have.

These guys have put out a game that looks very similar called Armed Forces Corp (looks like I'll have to add that to MobyGames as well) that I will be picking up based on my experience with this one.