Without Warning Screens and Info

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When the action finally starts, you'll be in control of one of the three living Delta Force members tasked with making your way through the plant, killing terrorists, saving hostages, and defusing bombs as you progress. Most of the action is pretty standard third-person shooter fare, and most gamers will feel instantly comfortable with the controls. The right trigger fires your chosen weapon, and the face buttons will allow you to crouch, reload, and snipe, as well as perform actions such as opening doors and defusing bombs. There's also a lock-on feature that allows you to strafe, although it makes things a bit too easy for my liking. I was told that the controls are still being fine tuned, though, so hopefully this will be toned down before the game is done.

As I mentioned above, however, the game has a few ambitious twists in store for players, although the extremely short demo we played didn't give us any picture of how they'll work. While most action games put you in the shoes of a single character, Without Warning will allow you to play as the aforementioned military men, as well as a few civilian employees. Each of the characters will offer different types of gameplay, although it sounds like the Delta Force members will be roughly the same. On the civilian side, you'll be able to control a secretary who stealthily hides from her potential captors, while a retired cop (now a security guard, natch) can access areas the other can't. Finally, you can play as a news cameraman whose helicopter was shot down while trying to film the situation. We don't really know much about what he'll do, but the folks from Circle Studios told us that he'll have some interesting gameplay mechanics.

Although the developers certainly have some interesting gameplay elements in store for Without Warning, it's way too early to how well they'll actually work. While the ability to play as multiple characters is sure to offer up some nicely varied types of gameplay, I'm not totally sold on the "24"-style time shifting. It could be really cool, but it could just as easily feeling gimmicky. Thankfully, there's a solid team behind the game, and if they can capture lightning in a bottle the same way they did with Lara Croft's early adventures, Without Warning could end up as one of the most intriguing games of the year.

Trailer

All of the action in Without Warning takes place over the course of a 12-hour period. The terrorists have infiltrated the chemical plant and the three-man team gets inside to take them down. Along the way there are three civilians that play a role in the operation as well. One is a security guard, another is a secretary, and the third is a cameraman who survived a crash in his news chopper after it was hit by a surface-to-air missile from the terrorists. The cameraman wants to get the story and survive while everyone else wants to get out of there and save as many hostages spread across the plant as possible.

So there are six playable characters in all, but the trick is that none of them really interact with each other directly. The timeline is somewhat similar to that of Siren where after completing one task for one character the clock will get wound back and another character needs to be controlled. After this job is done the clock gets wound back to someone else who then goes a little further on in the future and so on. There will be several times where characters see others or the results of their actions during their own segment, such as seeing a firefight from afar, but actually interacting directly would create a time paradox whereupon the universe shrinks into a singularity and life ceases as we know it.

To get the experience of fighting across, Circle Studio prepared a short demo level for us where we played as Jack Hooper, the youngest member of the team. This involved running around in tunnels, shooting at enemies with a machine gun, zooming in to snipe, and even exploding a barrel or two. In short, it's pretty much what you'd expect of any game of the genre, but the best part is that it looks very good doing it and is nice and comfortable for jumping right into. There was not much to see in terms of how the overall game will turn out from the demo, but at the very base level Without warning already feels good.

One thing that we also noticed is that there's a fair amount of things to interact with in the environment as well. By linking reactions with textures, Circle Studio has been able to dictate an items reaction by the way it looks. This means that if an entire steam pipe is covered with the same steam pipe texture, then any part of it can be shot to see steam coming out of it. The same technique is applied to other areas as well. It's a background addition, to be sure, but still a nice touch.

The shots are all PS2 screens. It will be interesting to see what the Xbox does with this.