Without Warning is a third-person, arcade-style shooter video game set in a vast chemical plant. In the midst of a brutal terrorist plot, the game follows the actions of the six playable characters; three Special Forces members, a security guard, a secretary, and a cameraman. Set over twelve hours, the feel of the game, storywise, is similar in style to the TV series 24. Without Warning was developer Circle Studio's only video game, before the company began focusing on DVD games as opposed to console games. It was also the first game that Capcom published that was developed by a Western company. Despite relatively high expectations during development, given the developers' previous work on the hugely successful Tomb Raider series, upon release, it received generally negative feedback by most game critics and players due to an evidently rushed release. Most complaints centred on the glitchy AI and numerous other technical inadequacies, coupled with a poor storyline and characters.
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From a technical aspect, the game runs like a bag of dog shit. Constant 19fps and frame rate drops with some of the most obnoxious repeating banter from the totally not racist stereotypical terrorists make for an unbearable listening experience. The premise of constantly changing characters that all indirectly affect one another's paths in the timeline, Is severely undercooked. Often you are playing as the three-man spec-ops group as they kill mooks in an arcadey run-and-gun auto lock-on shooter. Objectives are pretty much always the same: Free hostages, clear the area, and defuse the bombs.
This gets increasingly repetitive when these missions are bite-sized and can be beaten in less than 5 minutes. There are other characters such as the security guard, the secretary, and the news cameraman. The Security Guard's levels are just like the Spec-Ops team but with a pistol instead. The beginning of the game is a lot of back and forth between these 4 gun-wielding characters into the later third. The last two aren't introduced until the last couple of missions, and sadly only have a handful of missions between them. The pacing of these characters should've been added in between these shootouts. Since it goes in chronological order, you sit there thinking "Wait, where were they for 4 hours of this situation?"
For the quickness of the levels, there are a lot of them and I feel the game would've been better gutting half of them to give better credence to the 3 nonmilitary characters. For 50 whole levels, you spend most of the time with a majority of the characters doing the same thing, and that thing isn't even done well.
My interest waned in the latter half due to this repetitiveness. while the introduction is strong as hell and I wanted to give it a fair shake, but after rolling credits, it'll probably collect dust until an eventual trade-in.
sistema de fases um tanto curioso.