It's the one dept. of our government that has the proud and noble tradition of guarding the President of the United States, political figures and other important heads of state. They investigate counterfeit money makers and terrorism both foreign and domestic. They are the Secret Service and you are Dennis Sharpe, the department's best agent. Spanning 10 missions, Agent Sharpe will shoot his way through hostage situations, assassination attempts and other white knuckle/gun blazing action. Sounds like a pretty good title so far and what should have been a strong action packed first person shooter is bogged down by poor execution and shallow gameplay.

As Mr. Sharpe, you run through the various missions wondering why and the heck you even bothered signing up for this job. The thugs that come at you are so single minded and have no sort of A.I. that you will find yourself shooting at them as they stand there and try and hit you with a baseball bat. Which begs the first of numerous questions; why would anyone who is attempting to assassinate the president, carry a bat as their primary weapon. Moving on, the game provides a fairly realistic environment for exploration, but often the rooms you can get into or doors that eventually open have no meaning or purpose for the game. You would think the programmers would have placed a random weapon or ammunition in these places that are "off the beaten path", but alas, no. Instead the extra stuff you find is liberally spread around so that you practically trip over the stuff, like a Kevlar vest would be just sitting in a hospital.

To me, I found the game's controls a bit bogged down, like I could never find the correct comfortable mouse speed (and I sure tried) and therefore I could never get my cross hairs dialed in as tight as I have had in other games of this type. The game allows for head shots, and in some cases, it's the only way to stop an attacker before he smashes your teeth in, but I'll be boogered if I couldn't do it as effectively as I should have been able to. So the game was made harder then it should have been by a control issue that should have never been a factor in the first place. Don't get me wrong, a game should have it's challenges, but not one that involves the actual controls.

The game features an authentic cadre of weapons like what appears to be a Berretta 9mm, combat shotguns, assault rifles, and even a sniper rifle. All of the games weapons were correct in their varying recoil and reloading, but this in turn also tends to be a bit of a problem. Sure, in real life you cannot reload a shotgun with eight shells very quickly, and the game makes this ability "too" realistic. The reload time in the game is far too slow and will cause your death on more then one occasion. Which segue's nicely into the game's worst feature; the non-existent save feature. Instead, I had to complete levels before the game would initialize the auto-save function. And trust me, some of these levels really need to be saved every 20 seconds in order to maintain sanity.

Even worse, the game actually has decent graphics that the controls and poor A.I. simply don't compliment. It would have been better on some levels to have had this game's visuals stink, but no, the programmers clearly put some time and effort into the levels. Good shadow effects, tight line of sight, strong architecture design. Why would they have such nice graphics and then saddle them with other features that don't hold a candle to those nice graphics.

I know this is a bargain game, and goes for around $20, but I still feel the game deserves a pass. I've played good Activision games in the past (Return To Castle Wolfenstein is one of my all-time favorites), so it's disturbing to me to see a good publisher push out such an inferior product.

Gameplay: 5.2
It's almost too sad to mention, the game's controls just aren't very sharp, muddied targeting and apparently the slowest agent, ever, make this game just no fun to control. First person shooters are a genre that has a massive amount of followers, why make your game so poorly controlled?

Graphics: 7.8
Decent level design, good looking locations, authentic looking weaponry, sharp textures, the game looks really good for a "bargain" game, in fact it looks better then it should, which just makes it more sad that the rest of the game is done so poorly.

Sound: 6.4
The game's sounds are done adequately enough with voice work and other background noise, but the weapons are really under scored. Anyone actually hear a gunshot before they put sound to disk?

Difficulty: Hard
It should be a medium, but the sheer difficulty of the controls and no save feature push this title well into the "frustrating" category.

Concept: 6.4
With the popularity of Rainbow Six type of FPSs, the game isn't entirely new or genre defining, but the idea of playing bodyguard to the President is pretty cool.

Multi-player: 5.5
If the single player game just isn't that good due to horrible control issues, then what makes the multi-player function a little better? The fact that you are facing real people who have intelligence and know when to run when they are wounded. This doesn't however correct the muddy crosshair that I just can't seem to get over.  

Overall: 5.8
Ouch, the game fails on several key points and never recovers. I would be interested to see what would happen if the same idea were redone with the time and effort truly put into it.