SOE does a fantastic job of putting you, the gamer, into the action. Surrounding your character are as many as two hundred characters participating in the mad riot, and this does a lot for atmosphere; the mass of humanity weaves through the madness like a frenzied school of fish. The looters are particularly enjoyable as people are constantly running by you with TV’s and, well, just about everything else you can think of. The action is crazy, decadent and fun. In a pre Grand Theft Auto III world SOE would have been without precedent, but the legendary GTA III has blunted the edge of SOE—though the first time you turn your mini-gun on thirty or forty goons and, in the space of a couple of seconds, blow their heads off (literally, every single head--every last one of them), and because of poor aim, accidentally decapitate an additional ten or twenty rioters, you may wonder how blunt that edge really is. Though the cartoon like graphics moderate the effect, blood and gore are still present. A poorly placed hand grenade (or a well-placed one if you want to feel evil for a while) in the midst of a mob will splatter chunks of the unlucky people onto the lucky ones, running and screaming to get away.

The environments are suitably interactive; everything that isn’t bolted down is a potential weapon: trashcans, TVs, and barrels, for example, make good weapons. Conventional weapons are also abundant--a variety of machine guns, flamethrower, clubs, and several explosive devices, to name a few. In a pinch you can even pick up a remnant limb or rib cage and use it as a club.

If developers have learned anything from the smashing success of GTA III it should be that decent games take you on a roller coaster ride, but great games build you an amusement park and set you free to have fun—without sacrificing a narrative. SOE is marginally successful at creating an interactive playground, though to a much lesser extent than GTA III. Gameplay is divided into two modes: Kaos and Revolution. Revolution is the primary game mode. Action is propelled forward by completing various missions in the struggle to liberate a section of the city from corporate domination. Revolution leaders order you to perform a variety of tasks including demolish buildings, assassinate evil-doers, save allies and protect buildings. Additional characters are unlocked in Revolution mode—there are two initially selectable and three others can be unlocked. Revolution mode serves as a well-placed reminder that the difference between terrorist and freedom fighter is one of perspective, though many may dislike the suggestion.

In Kaos, players earn points for joining the riot and causing wanton destruction on, well, everything. Extra time is earned for waxing corporate goons, and periodically extra points can be earned for destroying specific targets such as cars, buildings, and so on. Clearing a stage in Kaos mode unlocks additional areas of the city. The action in Kaos mode is very free form; the point is to destroy stuff in a good old-fashioned riot, but how you do so is entirely up to you.

While there are only four stages, they’re all pretty long and there’s a lot of replay value, particularly in Kaos mode. Tragically, all modes are single player only. The absence of cooperative play (no splitscreen!) in a game like this is, if you will indulge me for a moment, a load of crap. The entire game screams for multiplayer co-op action: join the riot together and throw down tag team style with the evil-doers. Multiplayer is—ought to be—considered standard for a brawler and its exclusion is difficult for me to ignore. My enjoyment, as well as the replay value, could have increased exponentially with a decent co-op mode.

There are other problems with SOE as well. For starters, the camera is troublesome. It doesn’t adjust fast enough and requires constant help positioning behind your character. It is especially troublesome to deal with corners as you’ll frequently run around a corner and be blindsided before you can reposition the camera—though this annoyance doesn’t keep the game from being fun. The missions can become repetitive, although as you get into a brawler mentality, you might not notice or even care. Revolution mode has an autosave after each mission, and a manual save--though there’s a bizzare kicker here. Saving during a mission doesn’t save current progress; it only saves your position at the start of the mission (where you must start over anyway), so the manual save is basically useless. I don’t mean just useless as in not very helpful. I mean it is totally 100% completely and utterly redundant. As near as I can tell, it is not possible to use it, even theoretically, to accomplish anything whatsoever. It would have been nice to save during a mission, and the uselessness of the save option isn’t necessarily a drawback as much as it is a bizarre omission.

These issues aside, SOE is a fun game to play. This should be self evident, but SOE is not for children--or for those with distaste for violent games. Rockstar is cementing their two-fold gamer’s niche--making adult oriented games about criminals gone good (to one degree or another), and making games that rock, which will make them all stars.