By Dale Farris, Secretary
Golden Triangle PC Club
February 2004

Game Overview

Ruthless mobsters gather in New York City to orchestrate and initiate the first of three waves of crime and corruption designed to paralyze our nation. First they strike with bribery, blackmail, and blood-tinged corruption. Debts are recalled in the shadows of abandoned shipyards, while unsuspecting citizens suddenly become victims of human trafficking. Using prostitution, money laundering and drug cartels the second wave is only a subtle prelude of what's to come.

The most deadly of all, the Third Wave is the ultimate threat that could annihilate our Nation's capital. Our police force is under their control. Intervention beyond the law is the only way to fight back to save our country.

As commander, you must choose from 50 members of an elite group of paramilitary specialists and lead them on a series of 20 missions. Deploy your squad and direct each of them independently. Utilizing sniper, ballistic, tactical, and technical experts, you will operate in total secrecy to stop the mob dead in it's tracks. Thrilling missions in hostile locations have to be carried out to eliminate the core of mob control and criminal enterprise.

Some of the game's missions involve rescuing hostages from the killers before their time runs out, raid a heavily defended command center to steal encrypted codes, sneak in and capture a lethal arsenal of rockets and C-4 explosives, crack open enemy positions, halt the enemy's tightly run drug rings, or lead your team past guards, lasers, alarms, and killer dogs.

Game Features

20 missions in 20 different true 3D environments

Each of the 20 missions has various levels

Handpick your squad from more than 50 characters equipped with over 30 weapons

5 categories of specialist fighters, including: bodyguards, technicians, snipers, tactical male, and tactical female experts

Plan and implement your own strategy for each mission level

Independently move and determine tactics for your fighters

See through enemy eyes using the Vision feature

Multiple levels of challenge and awards system

Game Play

You move the characters and interact with the screen by using the mouse. The game supports a multi-button mouse, as well as a normal mouse. You left click to make your team members move, and they run if you press the Shift key with the mouse click. You see green circular/arrow icons on the playing area that indicate where you can move your players. If you cannot move to an area, either because of the game's built-in walls, or because you have not yet opened a gate, door, etc., you see a red circle/arrow icon. To move your character, just point the cursor to an area that shows green and click, and your character will go to that spot.

However, if during the character's movement to where you instructed the bad guys see you, then the artificial intelligence (AI) in the game takes over and the enemy characters will try to kill you. So, you must plan a strategy of moving and using your team members to their best advantage, in order to accomplish each of the objectives in the game's many levels and missions.

You use the numeric keypad to bring up the game's weapons. These include a knife, pistol, submachine, and sniper rifle. Note that the different weapons are used by the different types of specialists you can combine for the various game missions.

The types of specialists include an all-around standard specialist, a bodyguard, a technical specialist, a tactical male, a tactical female, and a sniper. Each specialist has different attributes, skills, and abilities, and you earn money as you move through the game that you use to upgrade your team.

The game supports real-time game saving, using the F6 key to quick-save a game. When you successfully complete each level, the game will also automatically save the game for you. To load this save game file, press F7. You can have only one quick-save file in memory. This means that each time you press F6 you are also deleting the previous file. A deleted quick-save file cannot be accessed later. If you wish to create save files that will not be deleted by the quick-save function, you use the game's in-game Menu to access the normal save function.

When the game starts, you choose your characters from among the 14 available types of mixes of specialists. Over time, as you earn more money, you can select additional characters to join your team.

You can play with various active characters, and as you continue in the game, the number of characters you can control will increase. This means you might need to use different characters for different strategically planned moves. For example, the tactical male might be needed to stealthily move behind the mob guys in order to quietly take out these bad guys. This ability to crouch and quietly move up behind another character is coded into the tactical male character. The other characters all have various combinations of various skills and abilities that over time you learn how to best mix and match as the game's many missions and mission levels kick up the difficulty.

When you first start the game, you can also select the difficulty level, from easy to hard. This translates into the degree of difficulty of the artificial intelligence (AI) of the bad guys, and playing on Easy mode in the beginning is a good way to get acquainted with the missions.

Each mission is scored based on whether you achieved the objectives, how fast you completed the mission, whether any or possibly all of the enemy have been killed, whether any of your team were killed, or other similar scoring elements. This sets up a greater degree of re-playability, as gamers can try various mission levels over and over in order to try and improve their mission score.

The movement of the characters is all seen in the third-person perspective, and you remain at a far distance from the actual scene of the action. Thus, all the game's characters appear very small, but not too small. The game's playing areas in the many mission levels are also nicely designed and are limited in total playing space. Instead of deciding to automatically load the screen with an ever expansive playing area, as you move the characters through these areas, as in Dungeon Siege for example, in this game you can see the entire playable area by moving your mouse pointer to the right, left, top, and bottom of the screen. This allows you to quickly scan the entire playing field from your initial starting position, which helps in planning an attack strategy. This pre-rendering of the entire mission level playing field also helps lower the hits to the performance of your system.

The game also includes a neat in-game scaled-down miniature map of the particular playing area, with dots representing your team members, the AI bad guys, and the locations in the challenge field where you need to complete the various mission level objectives. Once you complete these challenges, the in-game map then shows a green square that represents where you are to return your team in order to completely end the mission level. In many of the mission levels, you will have to get your team back to this end-point within a certain time, or the mission will end in failure.

The AI of the bad guys is well designed, and even on the Easy level you will most definitely have to wisely plan your attack strategy, if not try various approaches over and over in order to overcome this AI. This ratchets up the tension in the game, adding still more value to this already super new game.

The game also requires you to locate different objects or spots in the game, as well as figure out how to open gates or find ways to overcome what seems at first to be impossible barriers to further movement. All the while, you are having to keep away from the enemy as you strive to find the right path of movement, enemy characters to locate and kill in the correct order, and then to complete the game's objectives.

During game play, the game will show at the top left of the screen the mission level objectives, and along the bottom left icons that represent your team characters. You click on your team characters to activate them to do what you want by clicking the mouse. You left click on an enemy character for your team member to kill, by either shooting with a weapon or killing with a knife, and you also use the right mouse button to direct your characters to open gates or do something with the objects in the game. The game will show you these objects when you pan through the entire playing field and by moving your mouse cursor over various objects that are set up in the mission level to be manipulated.

The game forces a lot of sound strategy planning, along with a lot of trial and error, as you try and figure out the correct sequence of team member movements, enemy character killing, and object manipulation. Thankfully, each mission level has been smartly designed to not require an overly ambitious sequence of events, something you will definitely appreciate when you have to repeat mission levels over and over again, until you succeed in getting this sequence correct.

Age Group

Beyond the Law is a wonderful game for fans of first person shooters (FPS) and especially team-based shooter games. While the game is certainly no match for today's cutting-edge team strategy games, it is certainly hard enough and the quality design of the game has resulted in a super playing environment. Young children may need to be restricted from playing this game, as it is rated T for teens with a great deal of violence. The game's violence is also not gratuitous, as is the case in far too many of today's "realistic" games, and there is no red blood flowing when your team takes out the bad guys. Thankfully, the game focuses more on strategy and tactics, while building in an appropriate level of violence you would suggest from a game as this.

The point of the game is to lead a team of SWAT-like commandos into many various mission levels, and you will be planning how to most effectively kill the bad guys and complete all the mission objectives. However, even though the violence is there, the developers have not overly emphasized this, as is the case in so many other similar action games.

The controls are fairly typical to most of today's existing action shooter games, and experienced hard-core FPS gamers will quickly pick up these controls. These controls are typical of what is found in other similar squad-based, strategy FPS games.

While Beyond the Law will not challenge the complexity of today's high-end FPS games, nor the forthcoming Half-Life 3 and Doom 3 games, the game's overall design does do a good job of displaying the realistically created playing areas. The pre-rendering of the mission levels also means you can see all of this playing area, which helps in better planning a successful strategy. This also means this game will likely play on far more PC systems than other more challenging games that force a high-end, gamer machine configuration. Thanks are in order to the developer for providing us an action game that will play on so many machines.

Game Cheats

The game also supports in-game cheats that really make playing this super action game even more fun. Just type the word cheat at any time, and then this activates the game's cheat mode. Type the word noguards and the guards cannot see your team. Type the word allmighty and your characters cannot be hurt.

The game has been coded to be very difficult, especially if you play on the Hard level, so by activating these cheats I found playing the game to be a real delight. Each of the game's many missions and mission levels has more than one objective to accomplish, and by scanning the entire playing field for the particular level and moving your mouse pointer over the various locations in the viewing field you can get a better idea where you need to move your characters in order to complete these missions. When you do this, you also will see the game's many AI bad guys who are walking around or standing still. With each level containing so many of the enemy characters, finding and completing the right strategy will require a lot of trial and error as you try different approaches to a particular level over and over again.

With these cheats enabled, this already neat game just became even more fun. In addition, with the shortened game level design, this means you can much more quickly move through a mission level, as the game does not have the overly expansive playing field found in other FPS games now on the market.

Price

$19.99 (super bargain!)

Note this super price point. While Beyond the Law may not be a major competitor to such forthcoming games as Half-Life 3 or Doom 3, it does provide a super collection of fun features, challenging action, a neat team building system, and ease of control, all at a very impressive price point.

When is the last time you found such a well rounded action game at this price? I think most gamers will very much appreciate being able to have such fun in this game that will not break their bank accounts, as do so many other of today's FPS games. You will indeed quickly realize great value in this game and feel that you have received way more than your minimal investment in the game.

Minimum System Configuration Requirements

Windows
P-III 800MHz processor
Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
128MB RAM
500MB free hard disk space
Video Card
Sound Card
Speakers
CD ROM Drive

Mac Machines
Mac OS X, System 10.1 or later
Power Mac G3
128MB RAM
800 x 600 pixels (16-bit color min)
Video Card
Sound Card
Speakers
CD ROM Drive

Note that this game has been coded to run both on PCs, as well as Mac machines. This is one of today's rare games that will also run on a Mac. In addition, notice that the game's system requirements do NOT require a state-of-the-art, high-end, very expensive "gamer" machine. I was able to successfully play the game on my now relatively minimally configured system. This includes a P-III 800MHz processor, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Pro, a 30GB hard drive, an older 32MB video card, an older SoundBlaster Live X Gamer sound card, a standard Microsoft 5-button optical mouse, standard PS/2 keyboard, 24x CD RW drive, standard floppy, Zip 250MB storage drive, DVD ROM drive, and standard Ethernet NIC card. This configuration is today considered very minimal, and will NOT support the new Half-Life 3 or Doom 4 games when these important FPS games eventually hit the market (maybe by the end of 2004), but this system comfortably supported this fun game.

Thanks again are in order to the developers for designing this game to NOT demand a higher end, more expensive system.

Installation and Setup

The game should install and set up with no problems. You do need the game disc in the CD ROM drive to play the game.

Contact Information

Linda Weal, Media Coordinator
Magnum Games
580 Broadway, Suite 604
New York, NY 10012
212-431-4420, ext. 201
212-431-4420
FAX 212-431-4537
mail@magnumgames.com
www.magnumgames.com

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.