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he familiar: In Psi-Ops players take the role of a superagent, placed inside a terrorist conspiracy, who must fight his way through room after room and level after level of gun-toting guards, a progression broken up by cutscenes and battles with boss characters. The new: In Psi-Ops, Nick Scryer, the agent/hero of the game, fights not just with an assortment of guns, but also with six psi powers. The result: A game that, despite its familiar elements, is both fresh and fun to play.
The terrorist conspiracy, known as "The Movement" and led by "The General," has its own psi operatives, so in the prelude to the adventure Nick gets his memory wiped. This allows him to infiltrate The Movement. Once he's inside, a beautiful double agent gives him an injection that slowly returns his memory and, along with it, his psi powers. Each time a power returns, the player runs Nick through a training session set in a flashback. This allows the player to test out each new power before having to use it in combat.
By the end of the game, Nick is using telekinesis, remote viewing, astral viewing, pyrokinesis, mind control and a psychic leech ability. This last power restores Nick's psychic energy by leeching it from the corpses of his victims or (for a bigger recharge) pulling it from living enemies (they have to be caught unawares) until they die with a blood-splattering head explosion. The designers laid out the game so that each power has its place. The player must use all of them at one point or another to complete the game, but the obvious star of the set, the one that gets the most use, is telekinesis.
Telekinesis creates flashy kills
Compared to most shooters in this genre, the gunplay in Psi-Ops is weak. There aren't that many guns, the aiming mechanics are iffy, and the animations are not stellar. Fortunately for enjoyment of the game, the weak guns don't matter. Most players will have stopped using them by the end of the second level in favor of the much more useful and more enjoyable psi powers. After all, why shoot a guard with a weak-sounding machine gun, when Nick can pick the guard up with TK and toss him into a burning oven, with all the right sound effects?
Tossing guards to their death is just the beginning of the uses for TK in Psi-Ops. Nick can pull out-of-reach objects to him, he can stack crates to form ladders, and he can hurl objects as weapons. When he combines TK with pyrokinesis, Nick can set objects on fire and then hurl them at enemies, setting the enemies on fire. Or Nick can climb on top of crates and then ride them about through the air like slow, unsteady magic carpets. Remote viewing is used to solve puzzles, as well as for looking ahead to more easily ambush guards. Astral viewing is probably the least useful power, but it becomes critical at the end of the game.
Besides having the psi powers going for it, the game also has some very good cutscenes. It is possible to quibble with the voice acting, but the animation is great. In gameplay, the camera isn't perfect, tending to get particularly lost on stairs, and the enemy AI is a little too passive, but the physics engine is great and makes the TK effects look even better. The only thing that may annoy some players is that, on three of the four difficulty levels, as many as three guards alone have no chance against Nick. Even with just his first couple of powers, he will easily take them apart. Still, a game is awfully good when the worst that can be said of it is that it may be too easy for some people.
By the end of the game, there are so many different ways to kill that I found myself having trouble deciding which to use. All of the powers and some of the guns got a workout, but I kept coming back to TK—there always seemed to be a new way to use it. — Eric
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