Without Warning is just one of those games that probably looked like a great idea on a design document, but failed miserably when it was all put together. It's not because the concept was a bad idea, but that the developers just didn't put things together well enough to make the game work the way it should of. Without Warning borrows the concept of the Fox television show 24 and tries to create an interactive shooter experience for console fans that unfurls over a 12-hour period.

The story goes that a chemical plant (the Peterson-Daniels Chemical Facility to be precise) has been infiltrated by a terrorist group and will be used to cause large scale collateral damage on U.S. soil. The government finds out and sends a crack squad of military specialists in to deal with the problem, but their plans unravel as terrorists take out most of the team. The game opens with players having control of three special ops soldiers (Kyle Rivers, Jack Hooper, and Ed Reagan) and three civilians that they'll find later in the game. These other non-0military players include a secretary (Tanya Shaw) unfortunate enough to find herself trapped in the building, a cameraman (Ben Harrison) who was stranded after the news network's helicopter was shot down, and a security guard (Dave Wilson) also unfortunate enough to be caught in the middle of this siege.

Aside from what players use to get through or by these bad guys scattered throughout the plant, Without Warning's cast of protagonists are paper tigers, with no real backstory, personality of effectiveness. The military types use weapons with varying degrees of success, while the civilians use stealth to simply get away from the bad guys. And while their effectiveness in the thick of this siege is questionable at best, their real weakness is their lack of any real personality. This simply means that players won 't care much for who they are using, with only a few minor differences among them to make you want to care.

Like the personalities of your cast of characters, the storyline is very lacking, almost void of any real substance. All you really know is that the clock is ticking and that you either need to get by the enemies or gun them down.. and gunning them down is either too easy or too hard, with the AI's consistency and effectiveness being very questionable in most of the situations you'll encounter them in.

Maybe we could forgive spotty AI (which ranges from super ignorant to supermen), but what really makes the game fall apart are the shooter mechanics. For one, it is very difficult to control your characters. The game is set up in a way that makes using them difficult - and you can't change them in any meaningful way, leaving the player with a setup that they probably will never get used to. But let's assume that you can get use to the controls (as far-fetched as that is); even when you can figure things out on that front, you'll find that actually shooting at something is oftentimes very ineffective and unrealistic. Shooting a terrorist once or twice with a shotgun isn't always effective for example. Perhaps you'll take one guy down with a few well placed shots, but then you'll find that others are as tough as nails - and sometimes it's hard to even hit enemies with your bullets.. The shooting end of the game just feels broken.

Graphically, Without Warning is pretty solid, with the whole chemical plant environment looking as it should, complete with machinery, barrels, crates and an overall industrial feel that you would expect to see in a chemical plant. Sadly, this solid part of the game can't make up for the rest of the problems the overall gameplay presents.

Without Warning just isn't a fun or even interesting experience - most of the time it's just a frustrating mess that you wish you weren't experiencing. The game concept could have worked if not for the myriad or problems that plague this title. Playing from six different perspectives, having multiple plot paths and a decent story could have been fun - it's a great idea, after all - but Without Warning drops the ball and kicks it under the bleachers. Players looking for a 24 type game experience should stick to watching that show on television or waiting for the officially licensed game to release.