Ice Nine was one of the last first-person shooters released for the Game Boy Advance. It was developed by Torus Games and published by BAM! Entertainment in 2005, and it was originally going to be a tie-in with the 2003 film The Recruit. However, this fell through when the film failed commercially, but the plot of the game remains mostly unchanged.

The player takes control of CIA recruit Tom Carter, on a mission to investigate a plot to steal the highly destructive computer virus, “Ice Nine“.

The single-player campaign requires that you progress through a series of training missions, learning how to use the various weapons and gadgets at your disposal, and you’re then asked to participate in a covert mission to ‘out’ a possible mole in the organisation. You can play the game at three difficultly levels (Initiate, Trainee, and Graduate).

Your trainer, Michael Kurtz, gives you instructions before each mission, and provides exposition as the story moves forward. Pressing Start allows you to review your mission objectives, and to access a map that you can zoom in and out of, and move around using the d-pad. Pressing Select cycles through your weapons, and pressing ‘B’ makes you jump (a useful ability that allows you to get to out-of-reach items, or ventilation ducts that you can crawl through).

Initially, your first ‘real’ missions only provide you with “non-lethal ammunition”, and you have to shoot everyone with this to knock them out. But this feels like a bit of a cop-out, because you’re shooting them with a fully automatic weapon, which would probably kill them in real life, even if you were using ‘NLA’. Thankfully, in the second mission, you actually get to kill enemies for real, which is where the game livens up.

You’re given plenty of ammo, armour and health packs to help you survive, and on the hardest difficulty setting these are reduced, and enemy fire is much more accurate. You’re given night vision goggles fairly early on, and these allow you to identify targets in the dark more easily.

After completing each mission you’re given a rating, based on your accuracy and the time taken to finish, compared to par times. If you break a record, you’re asked to enter your initials to go on a high score table. You can also save the game during these intermissions.

Ice Nine is very well-presented, with relatively detailed 3D environments, and 2D characters and objects. There are some nice touches, like deformable walls (that damage, when shot); lit areas that are too intense for the night vision goggles; some atmospheric lighting effects, and even auto-climbing of ladders (which surprised me).

There’s also a multiplayer deathmatch mode for up to four players, and it’s actually pretty good (I managed to get it working fine in VBALink).

Overall, I’d put Ice Nine in the top tier of GBA FPSes. I’d say that it’s very good in places, and the movement and action are fast, challenging and exciting enough to warrant a recommendation.

More: Ice Nine on Wikipedia