Beyond the Law: The Third Wave is a squad-based strategy game that allows you to control agents who are hand-picked paramilitary specialists to help stop the ultimate threat: the annihilation of the Nation’s Capitol.
It is set in the modern day United States in a country that’s being overrun by bribery, prostitution, money laundering, drug rings and blackmail running wild, which leads to a plot to blow up the Capitol in Washington, DC. The Mob has threaten to take down the country. You take charge of a paramilitary group who’s task is to take out organized crime in the New York area.
Beyond the Law: The Third Wave has 20 missions in 20 different environments, 50 characters with over 30 weapons, 6 categories of specialist all round, bodyguards, technical, sniper, tactical male and female. All-round are often policeman or professional soldiers. Bodyguard is a trained bodyguard with no fear of the enemy. Technical is wiry, intelligent and friendly and will use his technological skills to get the team out of tough spots. Snipers are intelligent, sulky and prefer to work alone, all ex-army. On your missions you can run across guards and other items to help slow you down such as cameras, motion detectors, lasers and dogs. There is also a reward system build into the game. There are 5 stars to be awarded for each level to rate how you did in the level. You earn stars by level completion, level completion without saving, all team members survive, no guards killed or all guards killed, and level completed in time.
Game play in Beyond the Law: The Third Wave consists of 20 very short levels which are very simplistic, to the point that you don’t have to think. At the beginning of each level you can change the line up of your squad of specialists for the next set of missions. The one thing I did notice is that out of the 50 highly trained professional military personnel most of them use knives or pistols. Once you pick your team you can’t change their weapons, what they come with is it. I would say about half of the classes are worthless.
The game moves over 4 main areas: cargo, ship, abandoned motel, and warehouse. The major part of Beyond the Law: The Third Wave can be done with bodyguards and snipers just by killing all enemies. Missions range from hostage rescue, demolitions, assassination, and capture missions. The sad part is that most of the booby-traps can be turned off or disabled by flipping a switch or by sending one of your crack trained professionals in to do the job.
Guards are somewhat dumb, blind and deaf. This means most guards won’t see you until you are standing right in front or them and are very close. If you shoot a guard and he drops 5 feet away from another it’s like nothing happened and they didn’t even hear anything. They also walk by guards that are laying on the ground and act like they’re not there.
Most weapons are useless unless you are 15-20 feet away. This also includes the long range weapons, so you must be fairly close to even hit something. Aside from shooting guards there is not much more to do, you can’t climb anything, reload or pick up items. The only thing you can do is hide bodies with tarp.
Beyond the Law: The Third Wave’s graphics are just as bad. Resolution options are 800×600 which is very sad for this day-and-age. I was playing on a 21″ monitor and it just looks very grainy and blocky. Backgrounds look far from good with little detail. The option not to have a higher resolution really makes the backgrounds not look very good. The character models move stiffly and are poorly animated. Cut scenes are done poorly with very sloppy editing.
The sound effects and soundtrack for Beyond the Law: The Third Wave are pretty much useless in everyway and the voice acting is just bad. After you hear people say the same thing over and over again, you want to shoot your own people in your squad, just to shut them up. The cutscenes voice-overs are narrated and are just as bad as the video movement. The Soundtrack is nothing to speak of.
Controls for Beyond the Law: The Third Wave work, not well, but they work. All movements are made by mouse or keyboard. Cursors are used for aiming, walking and to activate objects. The problems with the controls are that they are just not that accurate.
Final Verdict
Beyond the Law: The Third Wave is a budget title in every sense and then some. Game play is very simple with very dumb AI. I can not recommend Beyond The Law: The Third Wave at all. All I have to say is nothing to see here move along.
Score
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