Beyond the Law: The Third Wave is a real-time stealth strategy game that owes
a lot of its gameplay mechanics to the Commandos series of games. Beyond the Law
takes place at a time when the US is threatened by a shadowy group intent on
blowing up the capitol in an attempt to throw the country into chaos and make it
ripe to be overrun. The perpetrators? The mafia, of course! OK, so the premise
is ludicrous but the developers are from Sweden so cut them some cultural slack
and just go with it. While it is not too hard to be forgiving of video games
with improbable plotlines, the same can not be said for poor game design.
Beyond the Law puts you in charge of a special operations unit tasked with
stopping the mafia’s plans and putting an end to their schemes (cue thoughts of
Tony Soprano’s Badda Bing club being overrun by Navy SEALs here). This will
entail completing 20 levels set in four exotic and exciting locations that
include a cargo ship and a warehouse. Before each mission you must select a team
of operatives from a surprisingly large pool of available agents. The agents are
grouped into specialized classes that include snipers, hackers, and bodyguards,
each of which has their own talents and skill sets. For example, the hacker
types will help you gain access to computers and disable traps while bodyguards
are good for taking on the mob in firefights. Given that the game does a poor
job of outlining your mission objectives you’d think it would be a daunting task
to sort through all of the available agents to pick the right mix for your next
mission. This is not the case, though, as in practice there is not that much of
a difference between the agents. You can just about select your agents at random
and move on to the mission, but you’re probably better off just going with
snipers and bodyguards. The other classes like to bring knives to gunfights and
are just about useless for taking out capos. That’s right; they’re armed with
knives, although some do carry a weak pistol instead. You have no choice in the
matter as there is no option to select the weapons for your squad. They enter
the mission with what they have and that’s it. Secondary weapons and accessories
such as grenades or flashbangs? Not a chance, they don’t even exist in the game.
Grab a slain enemy’s machine gun? There’s no way to do this in the game – I
guess the guns disintegrate upon their owner’s demise. So in spite of this you
still have agents armed with nothing more deadly than a knife. No wonder the US
is having troubles with the mob…
Once you’re in a mission you’ll find that there’s not much to this simplistic
and tedious game. You can move, shoot, and flip switches, but that’s about it.
No matter what the fuzzy and ill-explained mission goals may be it all boils
down to running around staying out of sight until you can get close enough to
each guard to kill him. To compensate for what otherwise would be a decided lack
of challenge, the game gives the guards an unholy range advantage over your
squad.
Other than being long range shootists your enemies have little else going for
them. Their field of vision is surprisingly shortsighted so they have to get
fairly close to your men in order to see them. And they don’t see anything
unusual when walking by a corpse of a comrade that you ‘hid’ by draping a tarp
over it. Their hearing is suspect as well and they are often blissfully ignorant
of the noise caused by nearby gunfire.
The graphics are about on par with everything else in the game. The resolution
is locked at 800x600, and even if you ignore the blockiness of the graphics the
small levels are bland and uninteresting and the cutscenes smack of
stock-footage amateurism.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
39%. Sometimes you can find a gem among budget title games, but that
is not the case here. In Beyond the Law you get exactly what you pay for … and
perhaps even less.
System Requirements: Pentium III 800; 128 MB RAM; 32 MB
Video RAM; 8x CD-ROM; 500 MB Hard Drive
Space; Mouse.
