SOCOM 4 Review

I have no strong attachment towards the Socom series, I like 2 and 3 and find them to be solid and enjoyable TPS games leaning on the tactical and slow paced side. With that said, what are my thoughts on this game, the much dreaded black sheep of the series? As far as the campaign is concerned, it's not the epic piece of shit that Socom fans hype it is, I just find it more on the disappointing side, not disappointing in that I got my expectations too high but disappointing in that there were some geniune moments of brillance but it's marred by the fact that the game is just a really average cover based shooter for most of the levels.

I'll start with the good, 45's missions are fantastic and are some of the best "forced" stealth segments I have played in a game. One big reason is that you have an actual stealth meter and darkness and foilage plays a role in the stealth gameplay. I really wished tactical shooters in general gave you some kind of stealth meter since they encourage stealth but they don't and this game doesn't fully commit to it more on that later. What makes 45's levels good is that like I mentioned before darkness and foilage plays a big role, and I love the fact that if you an enemy spots you, there is a few second timing window to stop the alert from happening as opposed to getting alerted and withing seconds later even when you kill the enemy, the whole hivemind knows. The game still has some twitchy AI from time to time, enemies can sometimes spot you out of nowhere but this doesn't happen a whole to be frustrating. Another issue is that you can't shootout lightbulbs, create shadows and manipulate the enviroment but at the same time I am willing to forgive since most games that do this don't even give you a stealth meter, let you hide in shadows at all and give you different stances while moving. Your crouch speed is pretty fast and the game checkpoints often enough where the stealth never feels punishing when you die, in fact the checkpoint system in this game is quite forgiving which helps because there can be some cheap and frustrating moments in this game.

Now on to the bad, while 45's levels are great, the rest of the game is a painfully average cover shooter, I don't think think the game shakes things up enough like Ghost Recon Future Soldier does either. A lot of it is spent going from cover shootout to cover shootout where you will flank occasionally and pick out enemies from long range which can still be pretty satisfying since weapon feedback is solid. You also get dedicated crouch and prone buttons which I also like, but I rarely ever used prone since stealth during the OPSCOM missions, you don't have the stealth meter making wide open areas where stealth can be done something you don't want to do since you will get spotted by guards eventually. The whole campaign just feels half baked too. You get to choose your own loadout but it's better just to have long range weapons at all times since close range weapons are mostly worthless. The game can be pretty easy which is fine, but there are also some grating difficulty spikes where dozens of enemies are swarming you and the penultimate level and one of the helicoptor bosses being some of the worst examples since in those situations it's a game of sitting behing cover waiting for health to regen. Another issue is that the tone and story of this game feels cookie utter Hollywood compared to past games, where past games had your teammates chatter and you are basically just a special forces unit meant to dissolve situations occuring around the world, here it's more cinematic, has a more serial plot, and has a heavy focus on character drama that I don't think feels earned since the story the game is telling is a typical military plot with not a whole of interesting things going on. Your team gets betrayed by a villain who's whole character get explained in a monologue in the penultimate mission. I don't think it's as interesting as past games while not being that great of a story in own right. I also really didn't care for the CoD style of "calling in airstrikes" during bigger set piece moments.