Without Warning is a 2005 third-person shooter for PlayStation 2 and Xbox that tells its story through six different characters caught in the same 12-hour hostage crisis. It’s best known for a “24”-style structure that shifts perspective between characters as events unfold, though its execution didn’t land as well as its premise promised.
The Setup
The plot centers on a vast chemical plant seized during a brutal terrorist takeover. More specifically, a radical terrorist group targets and seizes the Peterson-Daniels Chemical Facility, threatening to destroy it and unleash an ecological disaster that could kill millions.
With direct pleas useless and a full military assault deemed too risky, the only real hope becomes a covert operations team sent in to infiltrate the plant and eliminate the terrorists. The terrorist leader driving the siege is named Derbec, and much of the plot builds toward stopping him and what remains of his forces.
The Six Playable Characters
The story is split across six characters: three military operatives — a veteran squad leader, an unproven rookie, and a bomb disposal specialist — plus three civilians caught inside the plant. Those civilians are a security guard, a secretary, and a news cameraman who survived his helicopter being shot down after the terrorists hit it with a surface-to-air missile.
Each civilian has their own motivation. The cameraman wants to get the story and survive, while everyone else is focused on escaping and saving as many of the hostages scattered throughout the plant as possible.
How the Timeline Works
The game’s central gimmick is that all six characters experience the same 12-hour period from their own distinct viewpoints, with a “Timeline” feature letting players rotate between them so each completes their part before time runs out for everyone.
Rather than interacting directly, the characters mostly stay separate, though there are moments where one character witnesses another’s actions from a distance, like glimpsing a firefight happening elsewhere in the plant. The player controls each character individually, with focus shifting to a new one at key story beats shown through cutscenes.
Gameplay Varies by Character
Not every character plays the same way. The three soldiers and the security guard get fast-paced, arcade-style shooter gameplay, with a cover system present but light emphasis on tactics — the fastest route is usually just eliminating enemies quickly.
The secretary is the exception. She can only stun enemies with pepper spray or a fire extinguisher rather than kill them, and that approach is often unreliable, so she generally has to avoid alerting the terrorists altogether rather than fight them. Missions throughout also mix in puzzle-solving and hostage rescue, along with mini-games like bomb defusal and lock picking.
Why It Didn’t Land
Despite the ambitious structure, Without Warning was poorly received. One review summed it up bluntly: its shooting is tame, forward progress feels tedious, most enemies behave foolishly, and the storyline comes across as predictable and unentertaining. Another take was more balanced, arguing that the game has real strengths — inventive structure, solid graphics, and believable characters — but is missing key pieces like a decent storyline, engaging combat, and smarter AI, which keeps it from being the game it could have been.
Much of the blame fell on the game’s rushed release. Unfinished AI, awkward controls, and dour textures reportedly turned a promising concept into something close to unplayable, since bugs from the beta testing phase were left in the final product.
Join The Discussion
Have you played Without Warning, and how do you think its six-character, single-timeline structure holds up compared to other games that tried something similar? Whether you’re revisiting it as a piece of mid-2000s shooter history or discovering it for the first time, share your thoughts on which character’s storyline worked best for you, how the stealth-focused secretary segments compared to the action-heavy ones, and whether you think the concept deserved a better-executed sequel.
