Terror Strike

I really liked this SAS-themed tactical FPS, it was a pleasant surprise.

Take Rainbow Six, remove the pre-planning phase, leave just one 4-men squad, add more arcadey-like shooting, increase the overall tempo and you get Terror Strike.

What sets this tactical shooter apart are 2 things:

1. Speed is essential. You have to move forward and clear out rooms non-stop. The game won’t let you progress if you take too much time to finish a mission. This might raise a few eyebrows because normally tactical shooters let you take your time and carefully go through the environment „clearing it out“. Not here, which also makes sense, since real SAS operations don’t last long.
2. Enemies aren’t aimbots. If you’ve played tactical shooters, you know what I’m talking about, I think this is one of the defining features of the genre which sometimes might even ruin a game. In Terror Strike, enemies very often can miss you even up close which gives you a chance to kill the tango or quickly take cover.

Combine the above mentioned elements and you get a fast-paced double-tapping arcadey FPS that allows for some epic shootouts, last second switch-to-handgun moments and spray-and-pray kills that no Call of Duty game ever dreamed of.

There is also a „simulation“ mode available for every mission that disables the target reticle, ammo count and reduces the amount of health for the assault team.

Every mission has an intro video with John McAleese, a real SAS-operative that even took part in one of the missions in the game. His descriptions of the events are pretty interesting and feel very authentic.

If you long for some CQB-action, you should try this game. It’s perhaps the last one of its breed alongside SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate.

Terror Strike (or the Regiment in Europe) is a Tactical FPS developed by Kuju London and publised by Konami (that was a surprise for me). You play as a member of the SAS in a team of 4 and you act as the team leader throughout the game.

It has you classic tactical stuff, commanding your teammates to open doors, clearing the rooms for you and that's it for your team. It's not really polish in that sense.

I did not enjoy my time with this game. I'm gonna tell you some reasons why that happened:

Options:

The first thing you notice is the lack of graphical settings you can modify. I know, it's a 06' game but I can barely change the resolution and key bindings, that's it. Another thing to say about the game is that it might be better to run it in a virtual machine or something. I had a lot of issues trying to run it properly in Win10.

Gameplay:

It's not really great, again, it's a 06' game so I know that it can't be like a 2021 FPS game but basically it's not fun, the game is not tactical enough to be considered a good tactic FPS, nor Arcade enough to be considered a good arcade FPS. It's like the game doesn't know what it tries to be, doesn't know the primary target of it's own game.

You have 2 ways of playing each mission. One is the arcade mode (more health, more HUD elements on screen, the enemies have less health) and the Simulation mode (less health, no HUD and the enemies are tougher). The good about this is that you can choose wich mode to play each mission, so you are not forced to play the same way all the game. I really didn't try enough the simulation mode (I played like 2 missions) because I was not having enough fun in the arcade mode to even be bothered to try some "hardcore mode" like simulation.

Stages/Missions:

You have 4 main levels (embassy, farm, subway, parlament) and each one divided in 3 stages, so basically it's 12 stages. Every stage is short, you can finish each one in around 5-10 minutes if you know the stage by memory. And that's the way of the game to make you take longer to finish it. You have to memorize each stage in order to finish it with the highest score possible and with that unlock the next stage, otherwise you have to play the mission again and again.

You start each mission with a Primary weapon (some AR or SMG), a pistol, a knife, and a shotgun for your weapons. Also you have frag, flash, and gas grenades. You can also swap you primary weapon with any enemy you kill. They gave you the objectives before starting the mission and they don't change or add any other objective through the mission. If you want to finsh the mission with grade C or above (required to advance in the game) you have to do all the objectives and do it fast (yeah fast and tactical doesn't sound like right) because if you take too much time you are not gonna get a good grade.

Overall:

Don't play this game unless you are a hardcore fan of tactical FPS or fan of counter terrorist/SAS stuff. Sadly (or luckily) the game is not in Steam/gog so you have to find for yourself if you want to give it a try.