Put simply: This game consists of several unrelated multi-player levels in the box, with crude bot support. There's no campaign mode. There's no story. There's not even a way to issue orders to your teammates, if they happen to be bots, something that was available in Unreal Tournament, making its absence here quite glaring.

You really have to wonder who Infogrames has pictured as the target audience for this title. The single-player game is weak. And multi-player fans - with their lives rooted to the web - can download the free mod with almost as many maps as the retail version.

To this title's credit, the game is a stand-alone product and doesn't require you to own a copy of UT to play, as the downloadable maps do. Just as with the retail version of Counter-Strike, though, that's not enough to justify the purchase.

Like Counter-Strike, Tactical Ops is a terrorist vs. Army/SWAT team-based shooter. Though it claims to be semi-realistic, that only means it's a lot easier for you to die than in other shooters. In this case, the developers are going for action movie realism at best (i.e you can jump off of buildings and be fairly O.K. or you can run around bleeding and never get weaker).

Like its Half-Life counterpart, you can 'buy' weapons and equipment upgrades before setting out on missions. However, you're likely to feel ripped off doing so. Despite a fairly wide selection, many weapons simply feel lame. Uzis don't pack the punch they should. And some guns sound more like typewriters than firearms when fired. They may be modeled after some really cool gun, but that doesn't make them any less lame in a video game.

You can join either side: Special Forces or Terrorists. In a truly beautiful example of moral equivalence, though, your choice makes no difference at all to gameplay. The terrorists get points for picking up (hiding) drugs and cash, the good guys get points for confiscating them. Terrorists get points for moving hostages - and so do the officers. Each side loses the same points for a hostage death. In fact, one of the only real differences between the sides is that only terrorists can pick up and move bombs.

Bot AI is embarrassingly awful. You can dress your agent as a SWAT officer or solider, but getting your team to comprehend they are all working for the same branch is a fool's errand. And determining whether the figure approaching on the horizon is friend or foe is impossible until you actually have him in your sites.

Like many games in this sub-genre, most missions eventually degenerate into a raucous kill-fest, because meeting the real objectives just takes too long. I accidentally found unguarded objectives a couple of times, but well over 90 percent of the game play is just killing opponents and going out in a blaze of glory, if you live that long.

The game plays blindingly fast, especially if you are unlucky or uncoordinated. Many times, you never see the bullet that gets you. If you are in a single-player game with bots, you can restart a few seconds after death. In a multiplayer game, you have to wait, but you can switch to chase-cam to see if your teammates are really better players, or just lucky.

You almost always have more money than you did the round before, unless you start spending every last dollar on big guns. If you manage to survive the round, you even get to keep whatever equipment you had when it ended, so the game tends to escalate in firepower as more rounds are played. It's one of those weird instances where the game actually seems to encourage camping.

Since it's based on the UT engine, the game is more visually appealing than Counter-Strike - and as a free, downloadable mod, it's a hell of a lot of fun. As cynical as it may sound, this really appears to be a product whose target audience is action junkies who, attracted by its bargain price, will be fooled into thinking this is a completely different game than the one they've played.

Consider this fair warning: While there's some fun to be had with Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror, it's a terrible choice for the casual gamer - and one that the hardcore crowd has been already playing for over a year.

-Phil Conrad