Vigilance
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
SegaSoft sins: if Vigilance is truly the price of freedom, well, maybe I could use a little more regimentation in my life.
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This third- and first-person game gives the player control of eight agents-each possessing some of nine skills-from an anti-terrorist organization called S.I.O.N. You'll send them, individually, through 25 multi-objective missions, which comprise the familiar activities of killing anything that moves and then taking its belongings.
Feature for feature, I kinda dig the game. Head shots matter, as in SiN (which was to reach stores around the same time). The flashlight works more realistically than the one in Half-Life. Enemies still pretty much stand there and take it in the chest, but they also crouch, charge, stay within cover, and call in reinforcements. The scoring of the walls by bullets both friendly and hostile is agreeably specific to what's actually being fired.
You can play from two third-person and one first-person views. Back up against a wall, and third-person Vigilance seamlessly shifts into first-person-an improvement over the Tomb Raider games. Snipers in high places often plummet to the ground when shot-a James Bond-ish touch that's in tune with the Goldeneye-like feel of some levels. The default keyboard/mouse combo is almost perfect; how nice to have a game that you don't have to tidy up before you play.
Vigilance's levels are enjoyably immense and subtly intricate (I won't spoil the surprises, but surprises there are), and the game boasts a decent 3D auto-map. The mouse-based targeting cursor is also a genuine innovation in this genre-it allows you to fire on enemies in a natural, rational way independent of your perspective.
So if I love the features, why am I less than gaga about the whole? Vigilance needed more playtesting-and more thinking through-before it was released. To wit: when reinforcements showed up, they were running backward. When one of the plummeting snipers landed on my character's head, she walked around with his body balanced there for several seconds. When another agent died, his head disappeared into walls.
The game routinely locked up if, after an agent died, I went back to the main menu and started a new game. The loading took forever, and bursts of hard-drive activity during the game sometimes interrupted the action. The placement of the between-mission save screen is counterintuitive, and if you go back to the main menu (where it's found in many 3D action games), you'll lose your position.
Support for 3D acceleration is limited to 3Dfx-based cards, no Direct3D. While I can see the potential of multiple characters, I've yet to see the point to it in Vigilance. The missions seem to play out the same whichever one you use, and unless gameplay considerations required a switch, I wasn't going to give up a character with whom I'd established a bond.
Finally, while the Vigilance demo played superbly on Sega's HEAT.net online service, I can't say much for the server-based multiplayer game in the full release. My system crashed repeatedly while I watched, mouth open, experiencing the price of Vigilance.
