Review | Global Agenda

Format: PC | Genre: Action/MMO | Publisher: Hi-Rez Studios | Developer: Hi-Rez Studios | Release date: 01/02/10 | RRP: £29.99 + £7.99/m

Part third-person shooter, part MMO, part online strategy, Global Agenda certainly has its fingers in many pies. It’s primarily an action game, in that the majority of your time in this familiar futuristic world is spent locked in real-time battle – or, at least, waiting to be dropped into one. And therein lies the first of the game’s several problems: as a shooter, it’s a good few years behind the times.

Its class-based action almost works. Upon starting the game for the first time, you select between four separate character types depending on your desired style of play. Assault is the big bad-ass, and the guy I spent most of my time with. Recon is the sneaky type, capable of activating invisibility and precise with long-range weapons. Robotics comes equipped with the ability to construct shields and turrets, while the medic sports a gun that gradually heals those whom it’s shot at.

It’s Team Fortress-lite, in a way, with each class working together on a team to ensure maximum effectiveness in battle. Robotics characters set up defences, before the Assault player charges in, backed by the Medic at all times. Recon sneaks in around the back and causes havoc where the opposition least expects it. With everyone playing together with such ruthless efficiency, Global Agenda has a habit of sucking you in for an alarming number of hours.

LUCK OF THE DRAW
It’s a shame, then, that the game suffers from some of the strangest design decisions in recent memory. Take the player-versus-player system, which is where most of your experience points will come from. There are several game types, all of which seem to have been lifted from either Team Fortress 2 or Unreal Tournament. Except, you can’t choose which game type you want to play. Instead, you join a PvP queue, and the game decides for you. At least half of them are badly designed, resulting in mindless action that completely neglects the careful class-based play Global Agenda had previously set up. It’s bizarre.

The classes come more into the fore in player-versus-environment matches, from which you collect less experience but do have the chance to grab salvage for crafting. But these encounters are impossibly dull, emerging as a sort of throwback to early co-operative shooters with hideous AI, bland and linear level design and ludicrous, difficulty-spike-encrusted boss battles. Considering the meagre rewards available for playing these – especially at lower levels – it’s rarely advisable to pour much time into PvE at all.

Between missions you’ll spend a lot of time in one of a number of Dome City hubs, which are all identical aside from being on different servers. They’re also impossibly small, and serve only as an overly complex lobby system, rather than anything approaching a massively multiplayer world. You can purchase new armour, spend upgrades and generally stand around chatting. In practice, no one really does much socialising at all, instead opting to run around in circles and take a crazy kamikaze jump from the highest point of the city, since falling great distances does literally no damage.

In essence, it’s a case of the several different segments of Global Agenda all desperately struggling to work together, with each ending up diluted and clumsy. It might be part shooter, part MMO, but it’s not even close to being fully either, and as a result never finds its feet. Even the aesthetic lacks identity: it’s typical, shiny science-fiction fare, with such a flimsy story embedded into the world that, a month after I started playing, I’ve literally forgotten entirely.

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