MI: Operation Surma

Mission: Impossible - Operation Surma takes what was a pretty solid stealth/action game on the console systems and turns it into a mediocre, maddening run-and-gun game on the GBA.

For a system that arguably had the best year of any video gaming platform in 2003, the Game Boy Advance has sure had its share of weak titles too. Mission: Impossible - Operation Surma takes what was a pretty solid stealth/action game on the console systems and turns it into a mediocre, maddening run-and-gun game on the GBA.

Mission: Impossible - Operation Surma is based on characters from the Mission: Impossible movies. It takes Impossible Missions Force team leader Ethan Hawks and puts him into an uninspired series of over-head-viewed missions to stop a group that has developed a means to access every high-security building in the world. The whole mess gets held together with some low-quality cut scenes.

The game's been marketed as some kind of a stealth game, but most of the time you run around rooms in plain sight of some really blind guards. Quite often if you are within a guard's zone of control, probably about eight game-scale feet, he'll pepper you good with his gun while you try desperately to get the quirky aiming system to work or attempt to get close enough to use the sporadically-effective "take-down" move. At anything beyond that eight-foot zone of control, even if he's looking straight at you, it's like he doesn't see you. That'll teach evil empires not to clone Mr. Magoo as guards.

Basing a game on Mission: Impossible means you have to have gadgets, and Operation Surma does have a few. The multi-purpose gun is what gets used most. (Being free with a gun in a supposedly "stealth" game seems to count for very little.) It has the ability to be everything from a handgun, to a grenade launcher, to a sniper rifle, to a stun gun. Neat trick to be able to use several different calibers of ammunition in one gun (logic doesn't count for a whole lot either), but if you actually manage to hit something with the poor control, it works well enough. Other gadgets include the scanner that allows the player to identify traps ahead of him, the jammer that neutralizes those traps, the tracker that lets the player tag an object or individual for following, disguises that allow the player to avoid detection, command-detonation sticky bombs, a communications intercepting transceiver, code cards that copy entry key cards and store important date, and an inner ear communicator to talk to the mission controller, Luthor. In use, none of these gadgets really inspires a "wow" reaction. It just happens and you move on.

While no game's graphics on the GBA are quite up to the standards of the current consoles, Operation Surma's graphics are even below what most players have come too expect from GBA games in the last year. The whole look of the game is very bland. The sound effects are passable, but after a little playing time you'll want to turn the music off.

It would be cool to have a Splinter Cell or Metal Gear type game on the GBA, but Mission: Impossible - Operation Surma isn't it. Decline the mission and disavow any knowledge of this game's existence.