After a day like today, it's best to abandon the Future Gamer offices and go shoot some virtual stuff.
Zy Nicholson

If you followed our recent features on military training and simulation then you'll know that Spec Ops is firmly in the camouflage-netted camp of authenticity, placing you in command of a crack team of US Green Berets on covert operations. The strategy rests as much in equipping your team appropriately as in giving them orders to carry out your missions to the letter, and on this score there's enough real-world hardware in the form of M203s, L96A1 sniper rifles and silenced MP5s - all bearing the correct clip sizes, of course - to satisfy even the most disturbing of your friends.

Assignments range from terrorist suppression in Germany to base infiltration in Antarctica but, unusually, every mission is accessible from the outset. While this means you need never get stuck, it also destroys any sense of continuity or advancement as you play. Also, unlike Hidden & Dangerous, where you inevitably develop favourites, your team members soon become as interchangeable as their primary weapons.

The first challenge to present itself, though, is the front-end interface. Equipping your team is a no-frills procedure, while the Windows menu that pops up before every level to prompt you for the screen resolution confirms just how much afterthought was involved. In a game where a single bullet can kill, asking the player to go through all the option screens from scratch to replay is simply unacceptable.

Dive into the levels themselves and, in its more exquisite moments, Spec Ops II delivers a compelling experience of the dirty conflicts still being authorised today by world powers, ruthless multinationals and James Earl Jones in a cameo role. Crouching in dirt, with only two wounded Green Berets, a 5.62mm M4 assault rifle called 'Tammy' and countless hostiles nearby for company, the tension is palpable. No quick-save cowardice is allowed here: the only way to survive is to achieve your objectives without dying, and patient observation should overcome any number of enemy defences.