E-Mail This Article to a Friend Snowblind and tone deaf Project: Snowblind packs a punch, but lacks a heart BY MITCH KRPATA
	Project: Snowblind Published by Eidos. Developed by Crystal Dynamics. For PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Rated T for Teen.

Imagine, for a moment, that your body is devastated in an explosion on the battlefield. Unscrupulous scientists make you a guinea pig in their super-soldier program. When you regain consciousness, yes, you are faster, stronger, better than before; you also have luminescent veins, the ability to see heat signatures, and you're an open testing ground for new bio-augmentations. Wouldn't you feel, I don't know, a little weird? A little off? Second Lieutenant Nathan Frost doesn't. He doesn't seem to think or feel much of anything. All of these things and more happen to him over the course of Project: Snowblind, a new first-person shooter from Eidos, and Frost's most profound reaction to any of this is a mild "Cool."

Okay, so Snowblind's story is a little disappointing. Though it draws from reliable influences like Robocop and The Six Million Dollar Man, plot points are never more than perfunctory. The storyline involves a massive war set in Hong Kong (why not?) and an evil general whose master plan is to wipe out all electronics in three major cities, causing the titular snowblindness on – well, not a global scale, really. Sure, it would be a bummer if New York and Paris were blacked out, but the fashion industry would be hit the hardest.

The FPS gameplay is mostly solid, though, and if it suffers mostly from excess, that's not necessarily a bad thing. As the cybernetically-enhanced Frost, you will eventually wield an arsenal ranging from pistols to rocket launchers, as well as a menagerie of grenades and defensive devices, plus several bio-augmentations. Among the augmentations are ballistic shielding, invisibility, and a "reflex boost," which sends the game into slow-motion.

Nearly all of the tools at Frost's disposal are useful at some point (although truthfully, almost none is indispensable), but managing them is unwieldy. Allegedly, you can cycle quickly through your secondary weapons and augmentations with the d-pad, but that only allows you to scroll in one direction. There's also a more in-depth and dynamic inventory menu that requires halting the gameplay. Neither is perfect, but neither is a big problem due to the relatively slow pace of the game.

That's not an insult. Project: Snowblind is a little more cerebral than your average shooter, offering scenarios beyond simply trading fire with a determined but ill-disciplined enemy force. The AI is not terribly intelligent (they will march through a doorway one at a time, each one failing to notice the fellow in front of him getting cut down by buckshot), but each combat scenario is skillfully devised to require an approach different than the one before. You can progress through the game simply by blasting your way through it, but that would be like eating only the fried rice from a Chinese restaurant's buffet.

The game's most inspired move comes from taking a page from classics like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Using a piece of hardware called an "ice pick," Frost can hack into any computer system. This lets you overload security cameras, override automatic gun turrets, and otherwise disrupt the enemy's lines of defense. Even better, the ice pick allows you to take remote control of enemy robots, including fearsome bipedal assault mechs.

Because it's apparently the law to include vehicles in these games, Project: Snowblind also offers a variety of combat transports, all of which control poorly and none of which adds much to the game. There's an interminable parking-garage level that seems to exist solely so there are spaces large enough to require jeeps. Things like this tend to be the exception, though, and for the most part, the single-player game is less about progressing from point A to point B than about winning singular battles (often while working side-by-side with laudably non-idiotic NPC teammates).

The multi-player experience is solid, if uninspiring. I went online with the PlayStation 2 version of the game, and from a technical standpoint I couldn't have asked for smoother service. It stands to reason that XBox Live functionality is at least as good. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much of an online community for Snowblind. Searching for a vanilla deathmatch provided only two games in progress, and this was at eight o'clock at night. Still, there are plenty of multiplayer game modes, including team deathmatch and capture the flag (both of which are exactly like they sound), plus a pretty neat game called "Hunter."

In Hunter, whoever is in possession of a special token is rendered invisible and given all weapons and upgrades. His job is to survive; everyone else's job is to kill him. The longer one keeps the token, the more points one scores. Even though the server I played on seemed to be running 20-minute games (which was a little excessive), the gameplay was rock-solid and had no technical problems I could detect.

Project: Snowblind is good, not great. Anyone who's been jonesing for a new FPS will be satisfied, but the overall impression the game leaves is as bland as its protagonist's personality.

Score: 7.0 (out of 10)