Review:
Global Agenda

I have not seen many great MMO shooters since Planetside crashed and burned, Global Agenda is a massively multi-player third person shooter with the potential to be great, it's just not quite there yet.

When you start the game, aside from the regular customization options, you have to pick a class to play. Your choices are: Assault (essentially heavy weapons and tanking), Recon (stealth, sniping and speed), Medic (healing and poisons) or Robotics (deployables).

The tutorial is extensive and gets you through all the necessary controls of the game; it also starts (and ends) the story during this period. You are introduced as a bad-ass super agent who, for unknown reasons, is encased in a vat. You are brought into the light by the sounds of alarms with other bad-ass super agents coming to break you out.

As you progress, you are introduced to the commonwealth - an evil global government hell bent on taking over the world (sounds like it should be an Arnold Schwarzenegger film). Then again, we have to look at this as a shooter, disengage from the ideal of story and recognize that shooters rarely have great stories (like CIA agents magically becoming high-scale Russian terrorists with the flick of a screen).

Once you've completed your tutorial you land at the safe-haven of Dome City where you're unable to use any of your weapons or attack other players. Fortunately, you are able to enter the "Virtual Reality Arena" to test any weapon changes you make. In many ways, Dome City feels like more of a large scale shopping centre than a city and adds more bulk to why I think this game should have been marketed as a TPS than an MMOTPS (at least until more massive content is released).

Before I start on matchmaking, I want to go into detail on the payment models. Hi-Rez offer gamers a free trial that allows you to reach level 15 and restricts your ability to send receive mail (and thus unable to use the auction house). Thankfully you are still able to access main features such as the 10 vs 10 PvP. When you buy the game (£25 on Steam) you unlock the content that was previously closed to you, in addition removing the cap of level 15 and allowing you to reach the current cap of level 50.