Whether the popularity of the TV series 24 is still on the upswing or has hit its peak and is on its way down may be unclear. But either way, games based on the concept are on the horizon. Without Warning takes the time window down a big notch and tells its story in a span of 12 hours. But in the spirit of 24, this is a game about a terrorism plot with possibly devastating consequences

A mercenary group with bad intentions has broken into a chemical plant, and the military has already done a bang-up job of bungling the recovery operation. As the game opens, there are a few people stuck inside: Three surviving soldiers, a news cameraman, plant security guard and office secretary. One of the selling points of Without Warning is that you'll play from the perspectives of all these people at different times. Some of them are trying to finish off the bad guys and others just want to get out of the way and survive the whole fiasco.

It's a great idea, especially since there are so many shooters to choose from. Efforts to make one stand out from the others, outside of the characters and license, are long overdue. Without Warning puts you in the shoes of all of these characters at different times. Often the same scenario will be played over and over again, and the only difference is the character you control. The concept has obvious potential for great storytelling moments.

But the story - the plot, the dialogue - is so superficial, cliche and poorly executed you may have trouble believing your eyes. Sometimes characters and stories can be so one dimensional and obvious that they become funny or, at the very least, part of the scenery and easily forgotten (the renegade TV cop, for example, and the boss who chews him out after every chase scene wrecks the city). Characters like that can work, and they have a legitimate place in storytelling, as long as there's something genuine to provide contrast. In this game, it's all generic background noise. You might keep waiting for something to happen, for someone to say something you don't expect or haven't heard before, but they never do. What they do say is so horribly acted and cheesy, you'll wish you only had to deal with subtitles

It's a problem reflected in the gameplay, too. Every situation amounts to killing the bad guys before they kill you. There's nothing to do in Without Warning that hasn't been done hundreds of times before in other games. When you walk into an area, whichever direction you haven't gone is where the enemies will come from. And if you walk obliviously in, hoping for some sort of surprise, the game will start to chug because they're coming from around that next corner. Once you do see the bad guys, you better have enjoyed it, because then they'll either hide, charge across your field of view, or get stuck on some scenery. The action of killing these bozos ranges from frustrating - because they can handle a surprising amount of lead in their blood at times - to a relief - because they're just sitting there waiting to die and you know you're that much closer to done.

Shooting someone in a shooting game should be, at the very least, somewhat consistent. It should be easy, or hard, or even simple. But in this case, it's all across the board. There's a target lock feature, which is sporadically useful. At medium to close range, it may cause you to jump from one target to another. So it's best to lock on and stay as far away from targets as possible - your odds of hitting them don't seem to change. Sometimes you'll unload round after round into a bad guy, and sometimes you'll drop them in one shot, it's too random.

Your characters are also stuck with their original weapons - which goes against every major tenet of the "everyman versus the bad guys" theme. With mercenaries dropping machine guns everywhere, the security guard, camera man or secretary would at least attempt to learn to use one. But no such luck - there's no picking up discarded weapons. Your security guard character (Dave) keeps his pistol the whole time, for crying out loud, while machine guns are lying all over the ground.

It makes a little more sense that the secretary and camera man aren't interested in more weaponry, because their missions revolve around sneaking or running from the action. Those sequences aren't over fast enough. If the shooting mechanics are sloppy, the sneaking tasks are downright offensive. The controls are about as shallow as they come, and these missions serve only to break up the monotony and frustration of the shooting with something equally boring. Minigames for bomb diffusion and lock picking belong in the same category.

The setting is, as mentioned, a chemical plant, so the levels all look appropriately industrial. That means gray and boring, with lots of crates and plain walls. With the bar set a little low, this is one area Without Warning pulls off reasonably well. The characters don't look bad, either. Their mouths don't move during cut scenes, but other than that the main characters come off as fairly realistic. The bad guys are a different story. They move and react to the action awkwardly, sometimes dying far too dramatically.

A simple, one dimensional story, horrible voice acting and frustratingly boring and inconsistent gameplay make Without Warning an easy game to skip this holiday. Fair graphics keep it from being a complete waste of time, but with so much competition in the realm of first person shooters, there's no reason to seriously consider it