Classified: The Sentinel Crisis

Classified: The Sentinel Crisis
This game is classified with the C of "Crappy".
Genre(s): First-person shooter Platform(s): Xbox Release Date: EU: April 29, 2005 NA: May 24, 2005 Engine: RenderWare Developer(s): Torus Games Publisher(s): Global Star Software Country: Australia

Classified: The Sentinel Crisis is a first-person shooter game developed by Torus Games and published by Global Star Software for the Xbox in 2005, the game was first released in Europe on April 29 and then it was released in North America on May 24. The PlayStation 2 version was planned, but it was cancelled for unknown reasons.

Plot

The plot follows the story of a black ops soldier recruited for the military's Sentinel program, which involves an "intelligent" suit and multifunction rifle. The soldier must locate Landau, the scientist responsible for its creation, before the technology ends up in the wrong hands. Landau has formed a companionship with Dragomir Radovan, a powerful and dangerous Eastern European general. Their alliance has forced a further companionship between the player (the black ops soldier) and Karlo, who is the leader of a revolutionary movement.

Later in the game, once it is discovered that Landau is a traitor and plans on marketing his revolutionary creation in a maniacal technological installation, the player is captured and must escape. After the escape, the black ops soldier is ordered to execute Radulov from a distance and in the end of the game, battles against Landau, who wears an upgraded re-energizing suit (a newer model in comparison to that of the player). After taking out Landau, the game is completed, although Karlo dies in the battlefield, and the black ops soldier is left to lead his organization.

Gameplay

The player takes the role of a mutant super-soldier that wears the military's new "Sentinel" suit, a suit that has many abilities, like a better physical force, auto-healing, night vision, a zoom mode and an ability to detect the enemies at distance, kinda inspired by the first Halo game. The player is also provided with a multi-function rifle that can be upgraded later in the game, this rifle takes the role of many other existing weapons, like a shotgun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, and even a minigun.

Why It's Declassified

1. The cover art of the game is quite unattractive and even misleading, since it only consists of a simplistic logo of a trojan horse that is used by the protagonist in its uniform. Some people can confuse it with a chess or a Greek age-based game. It's worth to mention that the game's logo is also uninspired, as it looks like something that could be done in less than 5 minutes in Photoshop.
2. The main menu of the game looks completely horrendous and it's even less attractive than the cover art. It consists of an ugly pattern of moving puke green hexagons in the background, the game logo with the same puke green tonality at the top of the screen, a black rectangle in the middle to show up the many options available and a close-up image of the main protagonist of the game on the left of the screen. The worst part is the fact that you can't really change freely your control scheme, instead, you are limited to certain predetermined options.
3. The whole game idea and gameplay is an obvious and budget rip-off of Halo: Combat Evolved, especially because the character you play as is a super-soldier wearing a futuristic suit that has a lot of sci-fi elements, like a HUD in your helmet, the ability of regenerating its shield and health after a few seconds and the ammunition counter in form of a bar divided in several squares.
4. While the HUD in general looks alright and you can still see a part of your helmet in the upper part of the screen, the compass looks really ugly and you can barely see it in the screen, as it surrounds the nose part of your helmet.
5. While the idea of having many abilities to give an advantage to the player and a unique multi-function weapon is quite fine, there are several issues with them:
   • The night vision mode may sound helpful, but it ends up being a gimmick. It is necessary for the nighttime missions, but it's only that, there aren't stealth mechanics involved with it and you are the only living entity in the whole game that needs to use it, as the enemies can perfectly spot you in the middle of the night without any kind of light or night vision device to see you, and if this wasn't enough, the night vision mode will make your graphics look really blurry, something that can be tedious when you're fighting in a long-range firefight.
   • The scan mode just turns your screen orange and shows all of the living enemies in the area you're looking at, even if they're hiding behind a wall. The problem is that the enemy positions are marked with a big yellow circle, and since these circles are all of the same size, it's practically impossible to deduce how far is an enemy from you. Also, this may sound obvious, but the idea of pressing a button several times just to have a vague idea of where the enemies are end up being frustrating and repetitive, and it doesn't show any kind of enemy movement, just a static position of them.
   • Shotguns in video games are often known as the close quarter insta-kill weapons by default, however, the shotgun modification in Classified: The Sentinel Crisis somehow makes a weird exception for this rule. In a similar way to the shotguns of the original XIII game, the shotgun upgrade seldom kills enemies in one shot and you need to shoot between three or five times just to kill a single enemy. You can potentially kill an enemy with a single shot if the crosshair centre is dead on the enemy, but due to the spread of the pellets and the bad aiming controls, it's almost impossible to get a one-shot kill, making the shotgun almost useless.
     • The jackhammer (an upgrade to turn it into an automatic shotgun) is not better in terms of damage, as it has the same damage and, somehow, the spread of the pellets is bigger.
   • The sniper rifle is the most powerful weapon, killing enemies with only a single shot or only two, but it has two main issues: The first one is that it can be inefficient at killing multiple enemies, the rate of fire is so excessively low that it doesn't seem to fire more than 200 bullets per minute, despite being a semi-auto rifle. The second problem is that the reticle scope is very small, only a very small portion of the screen is occupied by the actual reticle, while the rest of the screen is just blackened and shows the elements of your HUD, making it look out of place, and of course, this only gets worse on modern resolutions.
   • Somehow, the grenade launcher seems to deal more damage than your rocket launcher, and taking in count that the grenade launcher also has the ability of taking down tanks (Something that can't be done in real life nowadays), the decision of adding a secondary explosive weapon is very questionable.
   • The mini-gun, while it can be useful in close quarter combats because of its high rate of fire, has a lot of spread, recoil and terrible accuracy. This may sound normal in FPS standards, but since your aiming controls are very imprecise and clunky, it can be hard to use it efficiently.
6. If all above wasn't enough, it takes a lot of time to switch between weapons. Depending on the weapon you want to switch to, it can take between less than a second and three seconds, something that can be critical at close quarter combats, since you need to fight a lot of enemies in a short period of time.
7. The M9 pistol, which can only be used on a single mission (When you get captured in the castle), is absurdly broken and, somehow, it's more effective than most of the weapons of your multi-task weapon, as it can kill enemies in only one or two shoots, even from a distance or if you shoot them in the legs, this only gets more absurd when you realize that your 12 gauge calibre shotgun takes around three or more shots to kill an enemy, even from a point-blank range. Also, for a strange reason, the character will hold the gun with his both hands in a way like if it was a single-handed sub-machine gun like a mini uzi or a Skorpion.
8. A great part of the graphical section of the game looks muddy despite being a game released in 2005. It gets more noticeable in the many structures and environments of the game, as they lack of vivid colours and attention to the detail. This is not helped by the fact that the HUD of your helmet is a bit dirty (Which, of course, you can't clean it) and the night-vision mode makes the graphics even more blurry than they should be.
9. There are several issues with the controls:
   • To begin with, the aiming itself is pretty stiff and sluggish, making the task of killing multiple enemies in a single room very hard, but this changes completely when you use your sniper rifle or the zoom mode, as ironic as it sounds, the aiming is very sensitive because the sensibility doesn't get reduced when you zoom in with your scope, something that is common in many first-person shooter games to help the player, to make the things worse, there isn't any kind of auto-aiming or aim-assistance to help you, meaning that the only way to shoot accurately or making small aiming corrections from a far distance is slowly strafing to the sides, which can be tricky if there are obstacles nearby or you're in a narrow area.
   • For some reason you can only walk fast when you're moving strictly forward, if you move the left analogue just a bit to the left or the right when you're walking, your speed will drastically slow down, making the pacing of the game really weird and inconsistent.
     • To add salt to the wound, this isn't even a problem with the suit, you will move the same way when you don't have your suit on.
10. It's quite obvious that the AI was poorly designed and programmed. For some reason, the enemies will not shoot you at long range and will just charge at you instead, as it can be seen here. When the enemies are nearby you, their respective AI's is pretty inconsistent, sometimes they can actually be challenging and take wise tactics to kill your character in an efficient, in other words, they will actually try to stop you, but most of the times they won't try to flank you, as they mostly take cover and shoot, kinda like Ride to Hell: Retribution. Also, the enemies are not very good at combat, as the accuracy of their respective weapons is terrible and they don't deal a lot of damage to your shield or your health, even on the hardest difficulty level.
11. At some part of the game, you have to escort a rebel officer back to his base, and as you could expect from an escort mission, this section is a real pain to play through, mostly because the officer is extremely dumb and he won't shoot the enemies, even though he is equipped with an AK-47 rifle, and of course, if he dies, you will fail the mission instantly.
12. The game tries to implement stealth mechanics in many missions, but in most of the cases, these stealth sections fail miserably because the same game design and artificial intelligence manage to ruin them. For example, shortly after escaping from the castle, there is a part where you need to infiltrate in an area without doing anything that could trigger the alarms, but whatever you do, the enemy guards will always face away from you and stay in the same position, making it incredibly easy for the player to take them. The only part where the stealth kind of works is when the main character is trapped and his suit is taken away, but it's a pretty simple stealth, as you only need to crouch and punch the enemies from behind or shoot them with your silenced pistol.
13. The missions are extremely boring and they just get repetitive the more you play the game. As expected from a generic shooter, all of the levels are quite linear and consist mostly of going from point A to point B with almost no variations, there are some different objectives that can add some variety to the game, like sniper sections, bomb plantings, stealth sections and parts where you need to destroy tanks with your explosive weapons, but it's more of the same thing and they don't happen very often, the worst part of all is that there is a lot of backtracking involved in some of the missions, making them even more frustrating.
14. The mission where you fight in a snowy environment has a cheap element where some enemies coming down from a gondola lift will shoot you with rocket launchers, the worst part of all is that you barely have time to realize what's going on and to react adequately, as these enemies are not visible with a naked eye and their missiles are very fast, in other words, it's almost impossible to know their locations in the first try. On top of that, you can't kill them with any of your weapons, you're supposed to run away and avoid them until you get inside of a train car, in short, the game adds an unnecessary change of pacing.
15. The game has an annoying mechanic where an abysmal of enemies appear after completing certain objectives. The best example to explain this is the second mission, there is a part where you need to plant four bombs in a bridge and a tunnel system and you have to do this in a very specific order, after planting the explosives, a lot of enemies will appear out of nowhere in sections that were previously empty, thus adding a jarring sense of unreality that is quite similar to what happens with the police AI in Cyberpunk 2077.
16. When you finally have to kill Radovan from a far distance with your sniper rifle, the game will not give you any indications of where and how does Radovan looks, the worst part of this is that the level where it takes place is extremely dark and the night vision won't help too much in this case, meaning that you can kill one of his soldiers without knowing it, and since the sniper rifle has a very low rate of fire, it's almost sure that he will escape after you take the first shot, causing you to fail the mission.
17. Shortly after killing general Radovan, the final firefight in the industrial complex is presented, and this is, from far, the worst part of the whole game. To escape the complex, you have to make your way through two areas with an abysmal amount of enemies, what makes this section so unfair and frustrating are three things:
    • In a similar way to what happens with ÜberSoldier, you barely have places to take cover and all of the areas are incredibly open, meaning that the combat will get much worse than the other firefights you experienced back in the game.
    • Besides the fact that this section has an exaggerated amount of enemies trying to stop you, all of the enemies suddenly have perfect accuracy and they can kill you in only a few seconds, and if this wasn't enough, most of them have weapons like grenade launchers and turrets and are placed in very inconvenient places, to the point that it can be hard for the player to spot them adequately.
    • This section barely has ammo drops from the enemies and in the environment in general, specially from the sniper rifle, and while you can still use your default assault rifle to take all of the enemies, it can be extremely frustrating and trial-and-error based, as the enemies are placed in places where you can barely see them.
18. There is one massive plot hole that can bother more than one: Landau betrayed the main character because he started to work on a new model of suit for Radovan's army and put the Sentinel in a great disadvantage. If that is the case, why didn't he destroy the previous suit to prevent the player to ruin his plans?
    • It could be possible to think that Landau didn't destroy the previous model of the suit because he wanted to have a mould for the newest version of the suit, but even if that was the case, why didn't he take the suit with him instead of leaving it abandoned in a castle where the player was trapped in and why none of the other enemy soldiers that were guarding the suit decided to put it on?
19. When you defeat the final boss of the game: Landau, a cutscene where the rebels celebrate the victory by shooting their weapons into the air is played, but not only that, the main protagonist of the game is also shown up holding the beheaded head of Landau, and if you didn't know, this is a T rated game, watch for yourself.
20. Completing the game will only take you between five and seven hours, or even less if you want to make a speed-run, and after this, there is nothing that can make the replayability of the game worth, there is no multiplayer mode, there are no collectables of any kind and there are no extra levels, probable due to the low budget.
21. The game makes a vague try at adding music to the many levels of the game. Instead of adding background music that could fit well with the respective pacing of the many levels, the music that is actually present in the game is the best definition of generic and repetitiveness, as most of the songs consist of short loops of 3 or 5 seconds that play over and over across the levels, sometimes to the point that they can appear in more than one single level or area.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite the low budget that was used for the development of this game, the game has better quality and lots of qualities that most of the low-budget games don't:
   • There are almost no bugs or glitches that could interfere with the gameplay experience, the most noticeable glitch is the one that will freeze the chat head of the character that is speaking to you in your HUD in some specific areas.
   • The voice acting is pretty well done and makes a great job catching the emotion of what the characters are saying, especially from Karlo. According to implantgames, "This guy is a riot and listening to him bark out orders at the beginning or end of the missions is a treat".
   • The frame-rate is very stable and there are no issues with the optimization, as the game runs at perfectly fine 30 FPS.
2. It costed only $20 at the time it was released, unlike other games that costed between $30 or $40.
3. All of your weapons have a pretty decent amount of ammunition, both in their respective magazines and reserves, the best example is the assault rifle, which can shoot 80 rounds before needing to be reloaded.
4. While the general graphics and environments are not as good and detailed as many other games of the same age, the character models look quite good and realistic.
5. While most of the change of pacings that the game has are not so well implemented, is still good to see some variety in the many levels that the game offers.
6. Some of the levels like the one where you fight in a snowy environment is quite atmospheric and pleasing to play.

Reception

Despite not receiving a lot of attention from the media and the gamers, Classified: The Sentinel Crisis was heavily panned by critics at release, and it currently holds an average score of 41/100 on Metacritic.

Charles Onyett from IGN gave the game the abysmal rating of 2.1 out of 10, in his review, he mentioned how generic the whole gameplay was and criticized the poor enemy AI, some mechanics that could make the game look worse as the night vision, the dull level design and objectives, the awful controls, the bad graphics and the lack of a multiplayer mode, but praised the environment destruction, the visual effects and how the game lacked major bugs and poor optimization, however, he didn't think that the few redeeming qualities of the game could make it better. In his verdict, he said the following: "Classified: The Sentinel Crisis isn't broken, but it's a bad game. It's got boring gameplay, poor graphics, unremarkable sound, and only one short game mode. Sure it's only 20 bucks, but it's not worth it. This may have been passable at the beginning of the Xbox's life cycle, but not now. While some of its individual elements may have occasional bright spots, Classified can't escape its gameplay pitfalls. It's just not a fun game".

Alex Navarro from GameSpot was more generous with the game and gave it the final rating of 5.4 out of 10, mentioning how linear and boring the plot direction was with its situations involving a lot of unnecessary firefights, the lack of punch of the main weapon of the main character, how sometimes the enemies could take a lot of dumb decisions, the low and plain graphic quality, the lack of a multiplayer mode and how boring and predictable the level design was. However, he praised the fact that the AI was challenging at some points, the implementation of many tactical combat elements and the voice acting. In words of him: "Making a new first-person shooter on the Xbox is sort of like opening a new Chinese restaurant in the middle of China Town. Unless you've got some big, creative new hook on the concept, or at least a really high-quality product, odds are you're going to get muscled out by the long-established and typically better competition. Global Star's Classified: The Sentinel Crisis is, unfortunately, a few Szechuan dishes short of a quality restaurant. To its credit, it's better than most budget-priced console shooters tend to be. It's got a decent level of challenge to it, the enemy artificial intelligence uses tactics to its benefit from time to time, and the voice acting isn't so bad. But those positives aside, Sentinel Crisis still can't quite pull together a captivating experience, due in no small part to the complete lack of enjoyable weapons and any sort of multiplayer, as well as a pretty short campaign and bland-looking graphics".

Cole Smith from Cheat Code Central, giving it a 3.0 out of 5.0. Unlike most, he thought that the initial premise of the game was pretty good and interesting and mentioned the good quality of the voice acting and how responsive the controls were, anyway, he complained about the inconsistency of the AI, the bad graphics, the weak audio quality and generic background music, the bad implementation of the multi-task weapon mechanic and the lack of any incentives to replay the game. Shortly describing: "If this game had been released in the 90s, it would have been highly recommended but we expect a lot more these days regardless of the price".

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