Atari has shipped Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, the highly anticipated cinematic first-person action game for the Xbox, to retail stores worldwide this week. Shadow Ops: Red Mercury offers players a gripping movie-style experience, claiming the now compulsory "Hollywood" production values, intense action and ground-breaking sound and visual effects.
In the game, the player fills the battle-ready combat boots of Frank Hayden, a special forces operative hand-picked to track down and destroy the stolen Red Mercury, a secret substance of unspeakable power that threatens the world with nuclear annihilation. The player will face off against blood-thirsty terrorists, renegade military forces and highly trained enemy special forces in a last ditch desperation mission to prevent the ultimate terror from reaching the world's greatest cities.
The game's features include:
- More than 25 hard-hitting single-player missions that span the globe across heat-scorched villages in the Middle East, bombed out cities in Chechnya, lush jungle guerrilla encampments in Congo and frozen vistas and secret underground military installations in Kazakhstan
- Hyper-intense split-screen cooperative mode through 10 unique missions designed specifically for tag-team play
- Xbox Live! and System Link competitive multiplayer modes that include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Escort the V.I.P. for up to eight players
- Immersive directional sound for ultra-realistic combat situations created by Soundelux, the Academy Award-winning sound studio best known for its work on films such as Kill Bill, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.
- An all-original score created by Inon Zur, a renowned composer of award-winning music for film, video games and television, that includes more than an hour of sweeping interactive music that reacts to the player's actions and changes for each location.
- All music for the game was recorded by the Northwest Symphonia, providing for a powerful performance and a more compelling audio experience.
- The game has earned the coveted THX Game Certification, indicative of the immersive and compelling audio experience usually heard only in blockbuster Hollywood films.
- Writers Tag Mendillo and Ric Roman Waugh, renowned for work in films and video games, wrote the entire script for the game, including all in game cut-scenes and cinematics
- Developer Zombie, Inc. traveled the world researching locations for the game's levels, taking thousands of digital photos to create ultra-realistic textures for game locations like the Congo, Kazakhstan, Syria, Chechnya and more
- Zombie, Inc. met with military consultants, including former special forces members, to create realistic character motion and military movements in the game; special forces members also provided motion capture animation for the game's cinematics.
- More than 30 minutes of movie-like cinematics were created by Attitude Studios; cinematics were storyboarded and shot like a Hollywood film, using dramatic angles and sweeping shots to further immerse the player in the interactive blockbuster experience.
- Shadow Ops: Red Mercury uses Epic Games' Unreal Engine to accurately recreate the realistic and gritty look of the game's many locations; the engine's power provides for eye-popping visuals, highly realistic textures, dramatic special effects and blistering multiplayer action.
Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is available this week worldwide with an estimated retail cost of USD 49.95. For more information on the game, follow the download tab above.
