Terrorists have taken over a chemical plant and are threatening to blow it to kingdom come. Six people, both military and civilians, must work together to stop this from happening, their stories split over a twelve-hour period, intersecting at various points. The clock is ticking. Sound familiar? Well, to all fans of superb action drama TV it will, but 24 this most definitely is not.

You'd think that Capcom would be a little choosier, especially after recent disasters like Monster Hunter and Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance. To my mind they're still one of the best publishers around, despite these occasional blips, but sadly Without Warning is just another blip to add to the list.

It looks promising to begin with - straight into the story, which isn't exactly original, but it's a perfectly reasonable premise. After terrorists take over a chemical plant, the special forces are sent in, although the team are caught off guard and all but wiped out, leaving only three survivors, all of them separated but for radio contact with each other and the military brains at Command. Graphically it's a nice game - although the chemical plant is a dingy, industrial location, and it's at night, making for a very uninteresting setting, there's a good amount of detail in the scenery and plenty to interact with - as well as barrels full of explosive chemicals, you can shoot holes in pipes and tanks, causing steam to vent out, giving you cover and scalding nearby terrorists. Of course, they can do the same to you, so be careful where you take cover. The terrorists are nicely detailed and each of the playable characters looks good, making for slick, well-presented graphics all round. Best of all are some seriously fiery explosions - the screen shakes, your controller rumbles, barrels fly and flames billow outwards. Great stuff!

However, you're only minutes in when you start to realise that the gameplay is somewhat lacking, and the realistic setting and story is completely obliterated by the totally arcade gameplay. Classing this as a third person shooter is generous - it really is more of a straightforward shoot 'em up. It's a terrorist turkey shoot, where endless waves of anonymous bad guys charge onto the scene, shooting their machine guns like their ammo's unlimited, and you just mow them all down.

The first thing that ruins the realism is the damage - or lack of it. Terrorists just soak up the bullets and head shots (except for those from a zoomed in sniper scope) are very hit and miss. Sometimes it looks like you put about three bullets in their head and they keep on going, whereas other times one does the trick. Either way, you really have to pump them full of lead before they drop, and when it comes to taking damage it's even more ridiculous. Often you'll find yourself having a full-on shootout almost at point blank range, taking endless bullets from several terrorists, only to see your health depleting point by point. And there are so many medikits to collect off dead bodies, as well as wall-mounted medikits that allow for repeated use, that a need for any kind of tactics is all but eliminated.

Another thing that makes the game feel very arcade - the pickups that hover in the air, bouncing gently up and down shouting, "I'm ammo, grab me!" or "Need grenades? Here we are! Over here!" Okay, they don't literally shout these words, but it really destroys the realism. Would it have been so bad to search bodies, or even just have the pickups appear on the ground and run over them? We're not complete morons; we've used our keen eyesight to spot supplies before, y' know. It doesn't help that ammo for your weapon appears (like the security guard's pistol and Ed Reagan's shotgun) on bodies of terrorists that were using machine guns. Talk about illogical. Meanwhile, the AI is somewhat shoddy - the enemies have one of two routines, either run towards you shooting with no regard for their safety, and standing right out in the open (or even continuing their charge towards you) while reloading, or stay put behind cover and keep on shooting, until you blow them up with a grenade, or pick them off when they stand up to fire. It really does stand out as being poor and you feel like you're picking off computer programs, rather than people.

Here's another flaw - security guard Dave Wilson only has a pistol, and can't pick up any enemy weapons to better arm himself. This is the same with the journalist that's sent in and the hapless female office worker who attempts to escape, who have no weapons at all. Admittedly in the latter two cases they're not killing terrorists, so there aren't really any guns for them to grab and try using, but these stealth sections are incredibly frustrating. You have to make sure you keep out of sight, and once spotted you're pretty much dead. So it's a case of sneak your way slowly around the area until you figure out a way of getting past the guards, doing their usual set routine bit, plus there are motion detectors scattered around the place that force you to crawl even more slowly through areas. It's a contrast to the gunplay of the other characters, but it certainly isn't any fun.

Anyway, coming back to the lack of reality, the best moments of true fiction are when a grenade explodes beneath your feet, leaving you on fire for a moment, and you only lose about 40% health. There are even suicide bombers that chase you and they can't kill you when they blow up in your face, if you've got full health. It's ridiculous, and quite comical, when the bombers are chasing you all around the level, as you charge around shooting all nearby terrorists, with the guy vainly telling you to "come here and say goodbye American," only for you to turn around and plaster him with bullets until he goes down and explodes. I always say goodbye - after all, it's the civilised thing to do. Even a rocket to the head won't kill you in one blast, unless you're already injured!! Another ridiculous thing is the way the characters' lips don't move at all in the cut scenes, so you hear their voices, while you see on screen the people just standing there looking at each other, saying nothing. And when you rescue a hostage, they run off (with appalling animation) and just disappear before your very eyes, like a wandering spirit returning to the nether world. There're so many daft inconsistencies here that any sense of reality is utterly ruined.

The idea of playing as six different characters, each with different weapons and objectives, is a good one. The three military characters have a good range too - you've got Jack Hooper with his M4, who takes the spray bullets approach, leader Kyle Rivers, who's equipped with a very tasty sniper scope for lovely one-shot kills to the heart or head, and Ed Reagan, who has a powerful shotgun with a good range but that's best suited for close-range kills. It'd be nice if you could vary the distance you throw grenades, but altering the height only has a subtle effect, and you have to be fairly close to get your grenade on target. When it comes to the other three characters things are a lot less fun - security guard Dave Wilson is okay, as his pistol packs a real punch, but the stealthy nature of the gameplay for the other two characters, as I mentioned earlier, is severely tedious.

One nice touch is that you can crouch behind cover and then when you hit fire, your character automatically stands up to shoot the enemy that you've already got targeted, making cover usage very effective. It's a shame then that this doesn't work behind walls too - you can target enemies while backed against a wall, but rather than leaning out to fire, you just shoot at the concrete. Admittedly you do need to take cover when there are half a dozen terrorists all shooting you, or you will die. But generally there's little challenge and I died more often than not as a result of being weakened by my own grenade bouncing off a crate and exploding in my face, than because I was overwhelmed by the enemy.

Despite all these flaws, the biggest problem is that the gameplay is so utterly shallow and repetitive that I became very bored very quickly, and would have given up long before I did if it wasn't for the fact that I'm reviewing this game. The dull setting really doesn't help matters - it was a huge mistake to set the game in such a boring, industrial setting and it would have been better if the story had moved around locations, 24 style, introducing new playable characters and killing some of the old ones off. I kept hoping that one of those lovely explosions would just take up the whole damn chemical plant and end the game early - watching the time, given at the start of each relatively short gameplay segment, I couldn't think of a worse fate than having to play through another 11 hours of this story. Still, I persevered a good way in, resulting in severe boredom. The things I do for you people!

There are mini-games, for defusing bombs, rewiring circuits and picking locks, amongst other things, but these are just as tedious and not fun as the rest of the gameplay. This attempt to add variety is a lame one and they could have been a lot more interesting than they actually are. The brief nature of each missions, manual saving in between, and load breaks, means that it's a disjointed and broken experience too - you're also flitting between so many stories that you start to lose track of who's doing what, and while the handy briefings do give you a succinct summary and something to read during the loading, you never really get to settle into any one character before you move to the next. Not that this really matters, when the gameplay is so dull and samey anyway.

On the sound front, the weapons actually do sound realistic, the voice acting, both in cut scenes and when communicating with Command and the other characters, is of a reasonable standard, but the music - there's one tune that plays all the time and it just adds to the repetition of the game. Couldn't they have come up with a different theme for each character? No, it's the same one throughout; it dies down to the quiet part when it's quiet, and builds up to the action part when the action starts. It's even there in the menus and level briefings - there's no escape!

Without Warning is a pretty-looking but utterly mediocre gaming experience that's little more than space invaders with terrorists. The concept is sound, the storyline is okay, but the implementation just doesn't work. It's not incompetent, but shooting wave after wave of terrorists, or sneaking around them, while defusing bombs and rewiring circuits in between, isn't half as interesting as it should be, and has been in many other great games, such as good old Splinter Cell for example, from which this is a world apart. Anyway, if you still give this game a go, when you realise that it really is as boring as I've said it is, just don't complain that you were without any warning…

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).