For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the first mission of Zipper Interactive’s 2002 title SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs. I always remember the Alaska mission, as when I was a stupid little child (apparently we were all one at some point) I’d get stuck on that mission and just wander about shooting folks. Slightly light on its feet, you can tell SOCOM started life in 2002, or rather had been in development for three years and was released in mid-2002. Directed by David Sears, Sears’ last known active credit was We Happy Few as Design Director. He did a better job with SOCOM.

Taking point on an active SEAL team, you play as Kahuna. The whole fireteam has codenames, almost sandblasting all sense of personality off of them. You head Able element, commanding over Boomer; Bravo element comprises Jester (very 2000s video game name) and Spectre. Like modern tactical shooters, you command them through a menu, though much like many games from the PS2 era, working out what button it is to open said menu is about as intuitive as that whole triangle to go back business.

Being Navy SEALs in 2006-07, of course, the terror suspects you are looking to take down are Russians, smugglers out of Sri Lanka heading to Thailand, a group of mercenaries based in the Congo, and being the ever forward thinkers, a group of terrorists in Turkmenistan looking to take a nuclear weapon to the Afghan border. You aren’t on massive DEVGRU operations like that of Operation Neptune Spear, but you are on simpler recon and sabotage missions. Less about realism and more about typical video game missions with a tactical bend to it.

Never released on PC, this PlayStation 2 and later PS3 and PSP series may be left behind when it comes to tactical shooters remembered now. Where the original Rainbow Six Siege, SWAT 4, and a handful of others saw great success and spiritual or otherwise sequels in some vein, SOCOM still hasn’t. Sony has been rather quiet about the series since shutting the servers for SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs in 2014; the online element of this 2002 release shuttered in 2012. Yes, despite releasing in a time before Twitter and YouTube, SOCOM was an early adapter to the online shooter community.

SOCOM was also an early adapter to the voice command tech, as the manual I still have boasts. The in-box promo also hyped up the release of Incognito Entertainment’s 2003 Kaiju battler, War of the Monsters. That’s how old we’re talking: A manual so thick you can kill someone with it and in-box promos, 2002 was a better time. The same can’t be said for the Iron Brotherhood in 2006 though, a group of former Spetsnaz operators becoming black market dealers. The group attempted to operate in former Russian, turned US territory, Alaska.

The first mission (the one I seem to forget) is set on a barge off the coast of Alaska. The second, the mission I remember so fondly due to my inability to follow simple orders, is set in the Alaskan wilderness where you get to employ your “M40A1,” a Remington Model 700 variant. The third is a standard issue bomb defusal on an oil rig, though this time without that pesky Metal Gear Rex bothering you in the middle of New York City.

With a total of 12 missions across four regions, there is a variety of scenery and objectives for your fireteam. However, as I’ve said multiple times now, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs is a very 2002 game, from its naive understanding of how America would label terror in the wake of 2001 to how it feels overall. Kahuna is perpetually running everywhere unless you are very gently pushing forward, and his aim is like that of a crack fiend jonesing for their fix.

The command menus are a little bit clunky. While the aforementioned Triangle to go back business of the PS2 era, over the modern Circle, kept me incorrectly selecting commands by mistake. Options, which are laughable by today’s standards as there aren’t even subtitles, can only be accessed through the main menu. So say you want to change the sensitivity of your aiming, you have to abort the mission, come out of the mission briefing to enter the main menu, and then open the options.

As for frame rates and performance, I’m a lot more forgiving when it comes to the performance of a PS2. Keep in mind that I’m using an old PS2 Slim, which is now about 20 years old. Next year it can join the SEALs in the bar and drink – isn’t the passage of time depressing? My leniency aside, I did notice certain moments dragging, and moments where clips were loading SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs would stutter a little. Back in 2002, this was fine, but when you are used to SSDs loading instantly, seamless transitions, and beyond, you do get a little tired of it.

Truthfully, this was a nostalgic vanity trip, having a look at a game I loved but was never any good at in the first place. I’m still not great at it, but at least now I can understand and address those problems. I’ve also become vastly more aware of where the fictionalizations come in too. The PEGI board rated SOCOM 16+, M – 17+ in the US, and despite those “realistic” ambitions, truthfully SOCOM would be more closely linked to 24 than it would a documentary. I say this because while it is aimed to be “fun,” those looking for SEAL-like gameplay could find it elsewhere.

The “realism” is very surface level, be it the mission you are on or the way you go about it with the gameplay. The briefing is pretty solid, with clear objectives, using whatever map is close and drawing out the plan, with the in-mission map being a bit more tech-savvy and directly telling you how to execute the given missions and objectives. Sometimes things go wrong – I had Boomer WIA’d on an op and we lost translations for Russian. The setting and the dressing surrounding it, the atmosphere if you will, want to give the big DEVGRU feel about it, but the light controls and heavy fire give off Hollywoodification/gamification.

Sometimes the terror suspects will spot you from afar, suspecting that bushes in this jungle environment from level 4 onward have eyes. The more aggrieving matter is that of the AI itself, be it friendly or otherwise. Sometimes they’ll employ a solid tactic like pulling a trigger to fire a gun, sometimes they’ll use that gun to beat a man around the head having run up to them in the first place. Ah yes, the Navy SEALs, masters of running up to a bloke and kicking him to death in place of the countless weapons on offer. Unless seemingly told to, they’ll also not bother using deployables either.

Graphically SOCOM was never going to win any awards in 2024, but at the very least I can say for the time some of the structures looked half decent. Not all of it though as the rough geometry and stretched textures are about as appealing to the eye as seeing four Navy SEALs coming to collect your stolen biological data.

For its “realism” bent of the time, there were better shooters both third and first person on the market, and going back that list has expanded. There was a clear attempt to bring something often not served to the console community, even now as we see titles like Ready or Not, for example, not yet given a console port. However, being the almost lone example of console tactical shooters in 2002 doesn’t make you the best overall, and in fact, it would be easier to recommend the fantastic Metal Gear Solid 2 over it despite being completely different.

SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs more open elements make it stand out, and its ability to offer a variety to its missions should be commended. However, I’d argue that it is another one where that mistress of nostalgia wins out on memories of it rather than its actual gameplay and experiences. Ultimately, you could come back to SOCOM and enjoy it for a while, but its dated textures, rough gameplay, and infuriatingly dated options at times can be a big downer to the overall experience with 20+ years of advancements in gameplay and technology.

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SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs

0.00

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• A fun, yet simple, tactical shooter.
• The briefing and overall atmosphere is fantastic.

Cons

• Quite dated overall.
• An options menu and design very much of its time.