SAS: Into the Lions Den MOTM feature

[page=SAS: Into the Lions Den Review]
SAS: Into the Lions Den, first started as a mod for the original Unreal Tournament and from the screenshots I saw of it back then, it was pushed to the extreme. Since then, the mod has moved over to Unreal Tournament 2003. It may not be pushing UT2003 to its limits, yet, but what they have done is fun and enjoyable.

Graphics
During the time when it was being developed on the Unreal Tournament engine, the weapon and player models of SAS where extremely detailed and high polyied for the engines limitations. Now, since they have moved to Unreal Tournament 2003 they are given quite allot more freedom and movement for what they want done with their models. They have used this to their advantage and upon playing your first round; you'll be welcomed by some nicely detailed weapon models and skins. The skins are the best part of the weapons; they bring out lots of little details not shown on the model. The animations I'm afraid to say aren't amazingly fantastic, they are let down due to the fact that they seem quite slow, apart from showing all the functions that any gun would normally do. All that needs to be done to them is to speed them up a bit and that makes the complete weapons top notch. The character models vastly improve their animations over the ones of the weapons and look beautiful. There is a few for both the SAS team and the Opposing Team. It's a nice variety, of urban and military gear. The maps that come with SAS are greatly varied in their locations and settings. From war zones, to Iraq, we should be looking forward to even more different ones in the future. Some are a bit bland and lack the detail of static meshes. Others are nicely detailed with tanks, barbed wire, and other assorted things. The maps are overall nice, but do deserve a bit of polish and touching up.

Sound FX
SAS's sound effects are nicely done. They lack the reality of some mods, but they are good enough, and provide SAS with some nice touches. There is a couple of music tracks included with SAS, the best one being the menu music, which is bloody brilliant. The other tracks are ok, but aren't good enough to match the professionalism of the menu music. Voices are included for both teams, and they match their roles perfectly. The SAS voices are sound British, which is the main location of where the SAS is housed. The Opposing voices are all "Rough and Tough" and of course, fit the role. No real need for improvement here, the Sounds are all great!

Game play
SAS does follow the now familiar Counter Terrorist vs. Terrorist formula. But it twists it and turns it so much; you only get a glimpse of it. What SAS focuses more on is operations that where conducted by, you guessed it, the SAS! Some of you may not know, but the SAS is an elite group of soldiers whose task is to complete raids on certain objectives quickly and efficiently. This may or may not be against Terrorists, and that's where one of SAS's strongest points lies. One of the locations that really intrigued me was Bosnia. As far as I know, no one has thought of using this as a location for a map in a mod, and SAS has chosen this well, and it pulls it away from the bunch. The next thing that pulls it away from the crowd of CS clones is there is no money system. You can automatically choose the weapons and equipment you want. Is there a catch? Yes At the start when you choose what model you want, you are also choosing your amour, and some other small things. Sure, you may think everyone will go for an armored plated model, but that will slow you down. A model without amour will go allot quicker against a model with amour. It all balances out quite well. Another unique system is you heart rate. Your heart rate is what controls many different things that you rely on during an SAS match. For example, when you run, your heart rate goes up. If you then stopped suddenly and went straight to your sniper rifle scope to take a shot, the scope will be bouncing all over the place as you worked up. Given a couple of seconds and it stops wobbling and you have a near perfect aim. This is true originality and I found it to be a nice addition to game play. Currently, as SAS is only in version 1, Team Deathmatch is the only available gamemode. This is perfectly fine for the time being, and the addition of "Sabotage" mode for version 1.1 looks real nice. The bots do fine for the time being, but that's only because it's a deathmatch style gameplay, it'll be interesting to see how the bots go in Sabotage, or if the team even decides to implement bots.

Final Word
SAS fares well in the growing land of mods, and with a familiar formula that's been twisted around, it will be fairly easy for people to pick up and play SAS. A small learning curve, great gameplay, and nice visual representation has made SAS Mod of the Month for February at modDatabase.

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