So what is the gist of it? If you have played Ghost Recon, you should have a pretty good idea of what this game is about. Unlike that game, however, you are alone - there is no team to control. Aside from that? The general gist is the same - creep around, staying undetected where possible and complete a mission (with a series of dynamic sub-objectives) that's based on a large game map. Lots of bad guys around the place and you can kill them if you want to, but the real skill comes in avoiding them. There are lots of them, you see, and they have alarms and walkie talkies - alert one, face ten.

To aid you in your cause, you have a nifty little visibility indicator (so you can tell how easy it is for the bad guys to spot you) and a thermal vision scope. This latter item is particularly handy, albeit kinda breaching a number of those pesky laws of physics. What it allows you to do is identify the locations of bad guys based on their heat signature - you can see their warmth, essentially. As the bulk of the missions occur in dark environments and the graphics (see later for more on this) are very rich in detail, having something like this handy allows you to spot the enemy from a safe distance - even if behind a door or in a building. Oddly, however, it ignores heat from everything else - steam, machinery and all manner of other warm objects do not appear to have any heat signature at all.

The levels are large - often taking more than half an hour to complete, even when you know precisely what to do. You can't "Rambo" your way across to the goal (you'd die, almost instantly) so you need to rely on stealth, which often means taking the long way and waiting for guards to continue on their patrols so you can slip past. It's great - a really good feeling of being there, intense atmosphere just oozes from the game. It's actually quite tough, even when you forget about the fact that you can only save three times per level (press i to save). Fortunately, the difficulty isn't too high and it doesn't get too frustrating, and yet remains challenging and requires that the player actually thinks.

Graphically, the game is excellent - top notch even. Large and open outdoor areas, populated with buildings, trees, plants and all sorts of other miscellaneous features without any sense of duplication. The areas feel real, are well lit and really do make you feel like you are part of the action. Easily one of the best looking shooters out there with easily the largest levels - all on screen at once. Fantastic. Two thumbs up here.

Aurally it's no slouch either - lots of audio cues alert you to what is happening in the environment around you, with chirping of night creatures, people milling around, security cameras and more all adding to an excellent and believeable audio backdrop.

Multiplayer options are extensive (Xtra should have a server up very soon, if not already), with much more than the standard deathmatch and capture the flag options on offer. This will be a good title to play at LANs or over the internet, assuming the availability of local servers.

So at the end of the day, what have we got? A graphically attractive title that is very immersive, with A very good "feel" to the it. It's like next-generation single character Ghost Recon, with sexy graphics and new gadgets to play with. The AI isn't the smartest on the block, but fortunately that doesn't really matter - if you get into a decent fire fight with them, it'll be over very quickly - long before any fancy avoidance routines would have kicked in.

In a nutshell, this is a good little game for the strategic first person gamer to pick up and get into. Check it out!