Previous Next

If you missed the end of that dull John Wayne movie in 1980 because of the storming of the Iranian Embassy, then you probably relate black clad, gas-mask wearing storm-troopers to the SAS. Bruce Willis did it in Die Hard, Lewis Collins did it in Who Dares Wins, and you get a chance to do it in Sabre Team, but it's not, as Noel Coward once suggested, falling in love. It's hostage rescue, and it's up to you to control a team of SAS soldiers through missions in this combined strategy and action game.

To start with, you're presented with mugshots of eight squaddies, from which you must choose four to make up the "Sabre Team". They've all got varying combinations of strength, markmanship, perception and action points, and it's up to you to pick out a balanced team.

Once you've got a group of guys who look suitably stubbly and mean, it's time to bedeck them in all that matt black hardware that makes the bad guys wish they'd put on their brown combat trousers instead of their beige ones. You can load down your boys with a fearsome choice of weaponry, from sniper rifles to belt-fed machine guns, plus the right ammunition, and then add grenades (CS gas or Stun) before choosing body armour, gas masks, and just a few band-aids in case those nasty terrorists take offence to you blowing holes in them and start shooting back. The relevant word here is "load", because, although one of the team could carry an MP5K for close quarters, an L7A2 for suppressing fire and a sniper rifle for, err, sniping, the chances are that he's so weighed down that he can only manage a few wheezing steps before putting his feet up, claiming that he's hurt his back and asking all the other team members for cups of tea as they rush past holding their severed limbs. Getting the balance right between equipment and mobility is the sort of thing you only get right after a few missions.

You've got the men, they've got the right gear, so it's time to send them out on a mission. There are five missions in all, the first being an assault on a jungle POW camp, with an embassy (inevitably), an underground military base, a hijacked liner and a missile factory to challenge you later. The game plays like a board game, with all characters having a certain number of action points per round; the less heavily laden they are, the more action points they have. Everything from walking to throwing a grenade is animated beautifully on-screen, but use action points, and a certain degree of forethought is needed in their use. For instance, there's no point in opening a door if you haven't got enough action points to blow away the room's occupant, it's much better to wait until the next round and do the job properly. Even rescued hostages have action points, though all they can do is leg it!

What your men can't see, you can't see, so if a squad member turns away from an enemy, he vanishes off the screen. It's all a bit strange and assumes that the team are incapable of turning their heads, but this "line of sight" method enables you to look through windows and doorways and spot enemies in other rooms. You run, shoot and bomb until you've no action points left, then let your ST do its thing...

Sorry, must have dropped off for a moment. The problem about Sabre Team is the speed your ST moves, or rather its lack of speed. This is "pop into the kitchen for a bacon sarnie" slow. Sit through three updates and any illusions that this is an action game with elements of strategy are dispelled. This is an attractive strategy game, period.

Your ST's the perfect place to play such a statistic-filled game, but at the speed this runs, you could probably play a board version of Sabre Team as fast. It's very similar to Space Crusade because of the isometric 3D view as well as the gameplay, but it runs slower than that.

However, it's engrossing enough to play all evening (and that's how long it takes for a game) and you do get that satisfied feeling when you drop the bad guys and extract the hostages, but there's really no reason for it to run this slowly.

Extremely playable one-on-one strategy game, with superb graphics and lasting appeal.

Slower than a sloth driving a Reliant in a traffic jam.