I’ve got to hand it to Midway: they have released some pretty good games geared for the mature audience in 2004. First The Suffering in the survival-horror genre and now Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. And while Psi-Ops could have been a fairly generic run-and-gun, third-person-perspective military game, Midway’s development team added some terrific play elements that put this game way over the top.
In Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy the world is at war with “The Movement.” The Movement is a terrorist organization made up of people with psychic abilities who formerly worked for various world governments investigating the use of paranormal abilities in espionage and combat during the Cold War. These programs, the one in the US was known as Mindgate, lost funding at the end of the Cold War. A rogue Mindgate general has gathered these former operatives from around the world and now seeks to use his psychic cabal to gain control over “mundanes,” people without psychic abilities.
The gamer plays as Nick Scryer. Nick has been placed by the UN in a position to be captured by The Movement during an attack. Nick has powerful psi-powers, but in order to make it past The Movement’s prisoner screening process and into the general prison population his memory has been blanked and his powers suppressed. Once captured, Nick is contacted by a UN agent, Sara, who has already infiltrated The Movement. She is to reverse Nick’s memory blanking and restore the use of his psi-powers. But something has gone wrong. Nick’s memories and the use of his powers aren’t coming back all at once. Nick has to learn to trust Sara, accomplish his mission to bring down The Movement, and cope with his only-slowly-reawakening psi-powers.
While Psi-Ops does arm the player with a rather standard compliment of weapons like assault rifles, sub-machine guns, shotguns, silenced pistols, and sniper rifles in the course of the game, it is the psi-powers Nick commands that are the star of the show and will become the favorite weapons of the serious player. While many games have individually incorporated elements of the psychic abilities that Psi-Ops contains, it is the combination and interaction of these powers that really make this game so much fun to play.
Psi-powers come in six varieties: telekinesis, remote viewing, mind drain, mind control, pyrokinesis and aura viewing. Telekinesis is moving objects with the mind. Remote viewing is using the mind to see ahead and through things. Mind control is taking procession of the mind of other people and making them do what you want them to. Pyrokinesis is the creation and manipulation of fire with the mind. Aura viewing allows the player to see things that are invisible to the naked eye. All of these powers, like standard weapons, use a form of limited ammunition. Psi-energy is expended whenever any of the five aforementioned powers are used. The sixth power, mind drain, is one way to replenish that power. Nick may mind drain enemies he has killed for a small replenishment of his psi-energy or, only if he can take the enemy unawares, he can drain a live enemy for a big boost. On a live victim the completion of the mind drain is accompanied by a spectacular exploding of the head like in the movie Scanners. Yep, it’s graphic. The game is ‘M’ rated for a reason.
Nick regains only one power at a time thanks to his faulty memory wipe. This is a great vehicle for teaching the use of the various psi-powers individually so the player doesn’t get overwhelmed. To illustrate how the whole panacea of powers might be used, let’s look at a hypothetical encounter between Nick and the The Movement’s mind-controlled grunts, known as “Meat Puppets.”
Nick approaches a closed door. He uses remote viewing to see beyond it and sees that it is unguarded entrance to a heavily-patrolled outdoor area. Nick goes through the door and ducks behind a cargo container. From here he observes two guard towers with snipers at either end of the area, several patrolling soldiers and an emplaced soldier with a rocket launcher. Nick uses mind control on the sniper in the far tower and instructs him to take out the emplaced rocket-launcher-equipped soldier. Once that threat is eliminated, Nick uses the sniper to take out more soldiers until the sniper’s friends realize he has been turned and kill him. Ready to move to the area’s exit now, Nick mentally snatches the other tower’s sniper off his post with telekinesis and hurls him to his death. A couple of soldiers start charging Nick so he quickly sends a wall of flame over them with pyrokinesis. Seeing a larger group heading his way, Nick uses pyrokinesis to set fire to a wooden crate and telekinesis to fling it at the group, killing them all. Heading toward an exit, Nick sneaks up on a lone guard and drains his mind to restore his psi-energy. The area around the exit looks suspicious, so Nick uses aura viewing, He discovers there are mines hidden around the area and easily avoids them. At the next door, Nick uses remote viewing to scan for a possible ambush and continues on his mission.
While this hypothetical scenario shows how all the powers might be used, the beauty of Psi-Ops is that the psi-powers can be used in many combinations to achieve the player’s goals in a given situation. Sometimes stealth might work better than a bloody confrontation. Nick can use telekinesis to move a box at one end of a room, distracting the guards, and then just walk right through to the exit. Learning and experimenting with the various uses of the psi-powers is about as pure a gaming rush as I’ve had in some time. Best of all, the control scheme is tight and becomes very intuitive as more powers are learned.
In addition to the previously-mentioned meat-puppet enemies, Nick will also encounter the products of earlier government work with psychic abilities. These boss characters are formidable adversaries and take special moves to defeat.
If the outstanding play mechanics of Psi-Ops weren’t enough, Midway also made the investment in great graphics, animation and superior audio. The Havok 2 physics engine is just unbelievable. Enemies go down like rag dolls when killed or thrown with telekinesis. The characters look outstanding and the environments are very good overall. The team may have gone a little wild with the particle effects, but it looks great. Everything from weapons sound effects to the voice acting make the game world come alive. The story, while it would never be a best-seller, makes for an interesting enough narrative to give the player a reason to keep moving forward.
