I played through the campaigns of all the SOCOMs I could still find the disks for to see how much nostalgia was tinting my memory of them. Turns out, they are just really cool games even 20+ years later.

I play Arma, Ghost Recon (Wildlands and Breakpoint) and other similar games still and they sometimes scratch the itch, but nothing has really replicated the feel of these games. The squad AI isn’t exactly the smartest, but it at least had the illusion of being complex. One of the coolest features to me (and it still is) was being able to tell your squad to breach a building and then they’d actually clear it out competently at least half the time.