Shadow Ops: Red Mercury Interview

I can understand why a publisher would port a good, successful game to another platform. So why the hell is Atari porting Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, one of the shoddiest tactical shooters ever released for Xbox, to PC?

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury isn’t a good game. The graphics are shoddy, the levels are linear, the weapons are uninspired, the storyline is unoriginal, the action is repetitive, the AI is AWOL, and the presentation is atrocious. There are no headshots, stealth elements, damage effects—shotgun blasts won’t make your enemies bleed, or even flinch—or anything else to distinguish Shadow Ops: Red Mercury from any other tactical shooter on the market.

This game was brutalized by customers and critics alike; it was actually worse tactical than Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix for Xbox, and that tactical shooter was shoddy in its own right, suffering from every problem Shadow Ops: Red Mercury had. So if it didn’t sell well, why is it being ported to PC? Who the hell is going to buy it?

Atari might try to fix Shadow Ops: Red Mercury before releasing it on PC. However, don’t count on that happening; this game was so sloppily produced that the only way to fix it is to scrap all the assets and AI and rebuild everything from scratch. Good luck on that happening; this is going to be a shoddy port of a shoddy game, and the only people who'll buy it are parents who don’t read reviews.