Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain (2004)

The original trilogy on the PS1 were very notable games: they were great shooters, they sometimes allowed some freedom to explore and tackle objectives your own way and they had a relatively forward-thinking design with diverse environmens, set pieces and a cinematic story. They were the best PS1 could offer in regards to third person shooters.

Omega Strain is a proper next-gen sequel that both looks and plays like a step-up from the PS1 generation. It still has the staple lock-on and autoaiming mechanics that are so much fun because they force you to move around and avoid enemy fire instead of standing still and aiming manually. In that regard I consider it to be an great example of a shooter that works great on gamepads. Not to mention that it's quite unique.

Now with the next gen came online connectivity and subsequently online multiplayer. What the designers wanted was a coop game with a campaign that can be beaten completely with 4 players. That in itself is very impressive for the PS2. Even now we don't see that very often.

Unfortunately, a primarily online coop game is hard to adapt to a single-player one. As a result some mechanics that don't really belong to the genre have made their way into the single player portion of the game.

First of all, when you die, you don't start again from the checkpoint but rather simply respawn. Every objective and every enemy you've killed up to that point remain so, and you simply continue on. That works in coop where you don't necessarily want to start over if one of the players died somewhere else on the map. Not so much in single player. Another such mehcanic is the progression system. Each mission has several objectives, none of them are considered optional, because to truly beat the level, you need to complete them all. Some of them are hidden and there's very little in the way of hinting or informing the player of how they can actually find them. However, even if you don't beat every objective and even outright fail some of them, you still unlock the next level. Again, perhaps it works online where if a level is just not fun, you might want to go to the next one instead of redoing it.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the size of some of the maps. Now obviously it's a ton of fun to spread out as a 2, 3 or 4-man group and tackle objectives this way. If it gets a bit difficult, you can move together as a group. Totally awesome, but unfortunately single player mode was not properly adapted. You move alone on a big map completing objectives sequentially which gets a little boring. What's worse, there are some easily missable objectives as well as escort missions.

The final complaint would be about the bonus missions. I only played the first one and if was quite fun. Unfortunately, unlocking a bonus mission requires beating par time on standard missions. I'm not a fan of speed running and I think such games shouldn't have such requirements, especially if they unlock actually fun and cool content. Yes, it's a challenge, but not an enjoyable one.

Omega Strain has a very fun gameplay loop, but it's not that much fun in single player. There are, however, fan servers running online for both players using the original PS2 and an emulator.