The multiplayer shooter genre is a very crowded space. Competition is rough, newcomers struggling to foster strong communities as new rivals rise with stunning speed. Special Forces: Team X from Zombie Studios is one of those games. It has some truly bright ideas in map design and plays competently, showing glimmers of what could have been. But with ultimately flat action and a lack of players entirely, Special Forces: Team X just can’t deliver.

A third-person cover-based shooter, Special Forces: Team X does a passable job. It contains the usual suite of modes such as deathmatch, capture the flag, control points, and marked man. The game is entirely team-based, red and blue armies decimating each other with a variety of firearms. The game has a leveling system through which you unlock new weapons, skills, taunts, and outfits. Character customization is limited, offering only four different skins and locking most of the clothing options under higher levels. As such, you and the rest of the community look alike for a while.

This is problematic because it can be difficult to identify enemy troops. Your only indicator is a small arrow that appears above each player’s head. The color tips you off whether they're hostile or friendly, but in the heat of battle, those split-seconds spent searching for that arrow are seconds that could have been saved via a more obvious identifier. The map, at least, thankfully, does mark opponents, but the same problem arises of having to take your eyes away from the action, a move that typically ends in death due to the quick pace of battle.

As such, cooperation with your team is not only suggested, it’s encouraged. Going solo never ends well, granting the opposing team a guaranteed massacre. Moving together as a single entity is key, as you need to watch each other’s backs to survive. Ambushes and surprise encounters occur at almost every moment, whether it be soldiers dashing around corners or whole teams suddenly emerging from cover points all around you. Having a squad of players at your side makes these situations far less ruinous. Additionally, working together multiplies the amount of experience points you earn, allowing you to level up and thus unlock more equipment at a much more reasonable rate.

It’s when your team is working in perfect concert that the game clicks. For all its encouragement, however, Special Forces rewards solo-play as much as teamwork. In Team Deathmatch especially, no one works together, with everyone splitting off in numerous directions. The strong perform well whilst the weak are murdered with little chance to contest, always ending in a quick defeat. The rare team who works in synch, on the other hand, always comes out on top, frequently obtaining victory. Control Point and Capture the Flag are the only modes where teamwork occurs regularly. Even then, players seem content with only pairing up when necessary (i.e. when the match isn’t in their favor) rather than a legitimate desire to cooperate.

The action also feels flat. Skirmishes end as quickly as they begin; the winner is determined based on who pulled the trigger first or who manages to somehow manage pin-point accuracy. There’s no struggle because everyone just sits behind cover and takes potshots. The thrills are fleeting, glimpses coming with the occasional all-out battle. But the modes and map design doesn’t facilitate these events. Players are incentivized to stay behind cover, to play safe rather than take risks. As such, it’s about waiting more than it should be.

Guns lack that satisfying kick, each feeling wildly inaccurate. You dump whole clips into opponents and oftentimes they come through either just barely alive or mostly unscathed – even at reasonably close range. The load-out menu displays stats for each firearm (range, accuracy, rate of fire, etc.), but they feel so arbitrarily calculated that they really don’t matter. Even then, getting access to later weaponry will be a constant uphill battle, as the rate at which you earn experience points is slow. Doubly so if you aren’t a pro.

Level design is competent, but has too much repetition. Special Forces uses an inventive level select system, where the level is split into three separate sections that are mixed and matched to the players’ liking. A map full of warehouses, for instance, or water treatment centers connected to a single docked boat. The combinations are numerous and fun to mix, but the lack of variety in locales is disappointing. It doesn’t diminish the ingenuity of the idea, however – I hope it appears in more multiplayer games going forward.

Worst of all, the community is dead. One week after its release, the player-base already dried up. One month later? It’s a ghost town. I haven’t been able to find a single game since its first week. My only success since have been with servers with terrible latency. With the community in such a dire place, whatever redeemable qualities the game contains are swiftly forgotten. Special Forces: Team X therefore falls into the annals of irrelevancy, but another footnote on the age of multiplayer shooters’ dominance.

Callum Rakestraw -- Associate Editor, NoobFeed (@c_rakestraw)