By Tom Cross

On the back of the SAS: Secure Tomorrow box, you'll be treated to some interesting advertising. In huge letters, you're faced with these instructions: "Stack up! Ready. Go go go" And here we go again. If you've played a tactical shooter in the recent years (or to be honest, ever), you understand what SAS is all about: you play one member of an elite anti-terrorist unit, tasked with stopping a new and particularly dangerous threat posed by some evil Europeans.

Secure Tomorrow takes its plot from a fictional period of British police-work, following the members of the SAS as they track seasoned killers and terrorists who first struck Britain in 1995. Secure Tomorrow posits that these killers, thought missing or dead, might reappear a few years later, and start wreaking havoc in London (and Iceland, among other locales).

When you think about it, the story they're provided us with is actually very interesting. The main characters all have a history with each other, and everybody loves a vendetta story. It's been proven that a first person shooter set in a serious, violent real world setting can be intriguing and exciting from a narrative standpoint (CoD4 being at the head of the pack), so I hoped that Secure Tomorrow would provide a modicum of that variety of drama.

Sadly, City Interactive, the group behind Secure Tomorrow, use this interesting backdrop to pave the way for bad squad banter, ludicrous moustache twirling villains, and a generally poorly told and executed globe-trotting story. Trust me, you won't be losing any sleep over the dastardly deeds committed by these bad men, nor will you care about the fate of a single member of your squad. The game descends into offensive cliché easily, as it depicts a gruff, grizzled SAS officer (are we supposed to identify with these people again?) beating a confession out of a captured terrorist, with the aid of a hammer.

It isn't entirely unsurprising that a developer would choose to create a fiction featuring such obvious and boring plot machinations, but it's annoying that they make us sit through their bad story. I understand the need for some kind of propulsive goal, but there has to be a better way to achieve that kind of game dynamic.

If the story is boring, the gameplay at least fares a bit better: it's merely tired and uninspired. The shooting gameplay in Secure Tomorrow is incredibly simple. Use your four weapons to kill terrorists as you move from area to area, using scopes, grenades, and relying on your teammates to kill the odd terrorist (although your comrades also spend a lot of time failing to kill enemies at point blank range).

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