Beyond the Law: The Third Wave is a first-person shooter game that lets you play the role of the leader of a team of professional crime-fighters who are trying to save the country from a plot to overthrow it by a criminal group of gang-terrorists. They have migrated beyond their first wave to an ultimate threat to destroy the nation’s capital with a nuclear device. You and your squad of specialists are the last line of defense. I haven’t played an overwhelming number of games of this ilk, so please read this review with that fact in mind. However, it was kind of fun to get rid of the bad guys and it is not realistic other than the sound of shots being fired. The guards are the enemy and you have to eliminate or neutralize them in some fashion or other. Since you control the squad and you are not seeing the game from their eyes, it really is more of a third-person shooter game, since you are seeing an overview of the game environment from above.

What I liked about the game is the flexibility of being able to choose from among your different types of fighters, bodyguards, technicians, tactical experts, snipers and all-around experts. If you choose the right combination, you can achieve your mission but if you choose the wrong ones, you are doomed to fail. There are also devices such as cameras, gates, doors, laser beams and locks to complicate matters. The puzzle part of these games is to figure out how to complete your mission and achieve the objectives lined out for you at the beginning of the assignment. You proceed through assignments to get to the next one. Once you complete an assignment successfully, you go to the next level. You have 20 missions to complete in 20 separate 3D environments.

One criticism I had was that in comparison to other games I have seen or played, the graphics were not as well done in this game. There were also times where, in order to unlock a gate or to hide a body, you have to wait 10, 15, 20, 25 and as much as 45 seconds or more for some tasks to be completed and for you to be able to go on to the next task. In other words, you are needlessly looking at the screen watching the time tick down and you can’t do anything else. Another problem I had with this game was the inability to get my “squad” to work together since you can control (move, fire, do any task) only one of your squad members at a time In other words one man uses his knife or fires his weapon at a time, even if you have three men in your squad, only one of them can do battle. This seems to put you at a disadvantage in the game, because if there are two guards, they will be firing at you simultaneously. In that respect, the game was somewhat unrealistic.

The games 3D graphics were only fair. The graphics rendering took some time because the game required that the CD be inside the CD-ROM drive in order for it to play. I am not sure if that was why loading the game took a little extra time, but it was not as annoying as having to wait 30 or 45 seconds for an assigned task to be completed. This, as you might guess slowed down the playing of the game immensely. Another criticism is the paucity of “how to play” instructions in the game. It was rather difficult to get into it because I really felt like I had no clue to begin with as to what I was supposed to do.

A quick socio-political comment about the game, is that following the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, this game may appeal to either your patriotic side or to your feeling of wanting more control and perhaps even revenge. However, let’s be clear that the terrorists in this game are crime bosses, mobsters, gangsters and hardened criminals not radicals from some other country.

The game requires Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, a Pentium III 800 MHz or equivalent CPU with 128 MB RAM, a CD-ROM drive, 500 MB free hard drive space and a keyboard and mouse to play. The game is available either in local stores or on the Internet at Magnum Games priced from $17.72 to $22.49.