When it comes to mindless violence and justifiable multiple homicide, there's nothing quite as good as terrorists. I don't mean the modern-day sort that little Johnny has you petrified about, checking over your shoulder in fear of anyone with a beard or a hijab. No, gentle readers, I mean the good ol' days when the word 'terrorist' was just code for 'cannon-fodder baddies'; when Hans Gruber not Bin Laden targeted towers, and when a hijacked plane was the realm of Ray Liotta, not a bunch of bastards trained on MS Flight Simulator. Sadly those halcyon days of disgruntled former soviet generals or nationless ne'er-do-wells are gone, but can we still be under siege or breaking arrows without offending or trivialising? Capcom reckon they can pull it off, and the result is their newest title, Without Warning.

For all my rose-tinted references, Without Warning borrows more heavily from modern television like 24 and Threat Matrix than from the Die Hard cinematic epoch, but there's enough of the old school sentiment to warm this author's heart. Origin-unspecific terrorists have stormed the Peterson-Daniels chemical plant, taking dozens of people hostage, killing others, and wiring the place with enough explosives to supply a century's worth of Bomberman games. They number in the hundreds, but in true blockbuster fashion, it's up to six (yes, six!) people with disparate backgrounds and skills to save the day. Yippee ki-aay!

Without Warning is one of those games where it truly pays to switch off your brain. The plot is cheesy and clich', and you literally will blow away well over a thousand plus terrorists before the night is over- the game even counts it for you! This is mindless action at its most mindless, but while this would've been quite sufficient on its own, Capcom saw fit to through you a deadly curve-ball in the form of three civilian characters.

You see, while the mainstay of your heavily-outnumbered war or terror comes in the form of three Special Forces guys, you are forced to also play as three non-combatants at certain points. Dave Wilson is a security guard who actually does have a handgun, but it might as well be a water-pistol in the face of the AK47's and other automatics gunning for you. Tanya Shaw is a receptionist who puts out fires and unlocks doors mostly, and then there's Ben Harrison the journalist, whose sole ambition is to record some great footage and become famous.

The latter two in particular are problematic, as neither can kill enemies, and both are very fragile. Which brings us to issue #1: woeful stealth-sequences. There really ought to be some sort of UN Declaration or Covenant against the use of poorly implemented stealth levels in games that just aren't sneaky in nature. Hell, even games designed for it often suck- just look at Stolen (XBW: 58%) if you need proof. Not surprisingly, Without Warning falls into the 'sucks' category when it comes to stealth: there's no onscreen indication of your concealment, no way of knowing if you can be easily spotted, or even how close you can get to your enemies'except for when they open fire and you die of course.

Still, these sequences only make up a tiny portion of the game, thankfully. Yet they can be frustrating and difficult enough to stymie your advancement, and may induce controller-throwing rage. Ditto for the controls and camera; controls are loose and sloppy, the camera ineffectual and sluggish'if it wasn't for the lock-on automatic aiming system, Without Warning would be virtually unplayable. It's lucky then that your spec-ops guys can take a ridiculous amount of damage, and also that this battalion of terrorists is so mentally deficient they make George W. Bush seem like a genius. Enemies charge at you blindly, race into the open to take potshots, and don't even attempt to avoid grenades.

To come back to my overwrought introductory paragraph for a moment, the whole point is that killing throngs of evil terrorists bastards is FUN! Or rather, it *should* be fun. Yet in Without Warning, even this simple, one would think unshakeable tenet, is proved wrong. Never has gunning for baddies been so disappointing, so bland, so boring. The horrible A.I. plays a part in this, as does the hopeless controls and ornery lock-on mechanism, but on the whole, everything about this game is counter-intuitive.

Why, for example, can you not pick up a single bloody weapon from any of the hundreds of enemies you kill? Even if they were untrained, a secretary and cameraman would feel a damn sight safer with a machinegun in their hand than they would with capsicum spray. Why are there so many doors that lead to dead-end passages? Why do the bad-guys feel the need to shout their arrival as soon as they spawn in an area? The answer to these questions eludes me, but the end result is that Without Warning just isn't very fun, for these reasons and many, many more.

So what does the game have going for it then? Well, the chemical plant is a great setting, providing lots of industrial set-pieces for some admittedly decent battles. The game handles itself a lot better in open-plan areas like courtyards and so forth, to the point where you can almost forget about the sloppy controls and cumbersome camera. But as soon as you're thrown into tight corridors or interior locations, the problems resurface with a vengeance, but it's rarely a fatal flaw. There's no saving during missions, but on average each mission only goes for 5-10 minutes, so you won't ever have to replay much.

As such, you probably won't need to replay many levels besides the stealth sections, although some of the timed missions can pose a pleasant challenge. The nasty terrorists have rigged the whole place to light up like a gasoline-soaked Christmas tree, and along the way you'll be tasked with defusing bombs, shutting down gas-lines or preventing electrical mishaps. Racing against the clock to neutralise bombs while fighting hordes of baddies is when Without Warning is at its most enjoyable, and in the later levels it gets to be quite a tense experience as you get down to the wire trying to get everything done in time.

Visually, Without Warning looks quite decent, with the Peterson-Daniels chemical plant and its various environs the standout, and the framerate is rock solid. Surprisingly, it's characterisation that lets the game down hard; the protagonist's faces don't even animate during conversations, which looks utterly ridiculous, and enemies and hostages have about half a dozen texture skins between them. I'm not asking for Half-Life 2 level detail or anything, but when you have three *identical* businessmen hostages begging you to release them, it's pretty pathetic.

Audio isn't a whole lot better either, thanks to dialogue that would make even Kiefer Sutherland and his co-stars cringe. The voice talent probably does their best with what they have, but in all honestly it's pretty laughable. Weapons effects and environmental sounds are alright, and the music is suitably over-the-top given the context. Special mention should be made of the wonderfully multicultural terrorists, who manage to sound French, Russian, Arabic and Indian all at the same time. Ignore the fact that some of them are actually wearing turbans, and you could totally buy that they're a multi-national felonious force.

What has been described so far is an average game with some glaring faults and a few redeeming qualities, but sadly, there's one final layer of issues that plagues Without Warning: bugs. Not the kind of bugs that are fun to kill in Starship Troopers either mind you, rather the kind that ruin games and annoy gamers. They range from mild, like explosions damaging you through walls (or enemies getting stuck in said walls!) or audio not playing, to the more, shall we say, severe end of the spectrum'complete crashes and scripted events that refuse to play out, making the mission (and thus the entire game) unwinnable unless circumvented.

If you somehow manage to dodge the above issues, Without Warning would probably take you about 7-10 hours to complete, but I couldn't say for sure, as at the time of writing I was unable to finish the game despite multiple reloads thanks to a glitched terrorist who won't die, and a door that won't open'then, without warning, the game was removed from my Xbox, never to return again'