Special Forces: Team X Review
Special Forces: Team X is the latest release from Zombie Studios, creators of the cult FPS duo Blacklight: Retribution and Blacklight: Tango Down. Team X can broadly be summarised like this: it's one part Borderlands, two parts Call of Duty and five parts Gears of War. Its debt to Borderlands is purely cosmetic, as the game boasts a surprisingly glossy cel-shaded visual style. In addition, you'll see multi-coloured damage digits flying out of your enemies when you fire lead into them.
The vast (and initially convoluted) labyrinth of upgrades and perks is straight out of Call of Duty, with some parts of your potential arsenal - like the instantly deployed attack dogs - being unapologetically lifted from CoD wholesale. Earning XP raises your rank which in turn increases the number of tactical options available to you, and the only area in which this age-old system differs from Call of Duty's is that you don't quite level up quickly enough. Consequently, because the game is a competitive online shooter with no offline component at all, the learning curve can be maddeningly steep at times.
​One thing that the game does do however is allow you to adopt the kit and load-out of anyone that you gun down in the field, letting you experience a bit of what you've still got to come. Weapon crates spawn at random during play too, and these allow you to toy with things like mini-guns and grenade launchers, neither of which are as senselessly over-powered as they might have been in something like Gears of War.
The game types on offer are precisely what you'd expect: there's Capture the Flag and Team Death Match, and successful variants of staples like Domination and Headquarters. The objective-based game types work very well indeed, and despite the fact that each level looks like it was based on the finale from every B-movie action thriller ever made - featuring warehouses, oil drums, shipping crates, wire fences and the odd truck-mounted crane - there are secret pathways galore which allow you and your team to execute some very gratifying flanking manoeuvres.
Standard death matches are a much less enjoyable proposition, and this is largely for the same reason that similar modes in Gears of War and its sequels were (for me, at least) the exact polar opposite of satisfying. After all, if you know that you are able to remain almost entirely hidden in certain areas of certain environments, what's stopping you from just sitting there and waiting for some poor sap to wander past, at which point you can instantly gib his face into oblivion with a shotgun? If that kind of behaviour irritated you in Gears, you can comfortably (and unfortunately) expect to find more of it here.
There's no doubt that this is a pretty darned derivative videogame, but the thing just plain works, and once you've levelled up beyond rank 5 or 6, you're very likely to garner a bit of a taste for it. Incidentally, one thing that definitely is new is the extremely novel way in which you customise - rather than select - each map before a match. Instead of choosing from a list of maps called things like Gun Metal or Blood Shot, here you use three reels to match different areas up with each other. So for example, the middle third of your next level can be a warehouse bookended by two sections of space from the waterside docking environment. Or vice versa. It's a very neat idea, and there are only two things that prevent it from being a downright brilliant one: the whole package looks way too samey regardless of how much you mess around with the level design, and each environment is simply way too big, which kills all momentum when you aren't playing with (or against) a full team of players.
So what you've got here is a fun and visually appealing little shooter that basically has only two things wrong with it. Firstly, if you're currently still enjoying a third or first-person shooter that has similar elements to this one, there's not much point in getting stuck in: it patently isn't a better game than CoD, Battlefield or Gears of War to name just three. The second issue involves the game's potential audience, or more importantly, the potential lack of one. Shelling out for an online-only game is a risky proposition at the best of times, and Team X might not stand out from the crowd enough to appeal to a significant number of people; sadly it could potentially be a wasteland of empty servers before the summer has even rolled around.
But this isn't the creators' fault, and it's important to celebrate a title as entertaining and thoughtfully designed as this one. It sure as hell isn't original, but if you are looking for something like this (and ideally have a few willing friends in tow) it almost certainly won't let you down.
7/10
Review By Chet Roivas
