The game is a third-person shooter with stealth elements. The player must make use of the cover system to safely shoot various armed terrorists, with a variety of weapons (a sub-machine gun, shotgun, silenced pistol, rocket launcher), all needing ammunition found in the world, however the basic pistol has infinite ammunition. The player cannot move while shooting; instead, the control stick is used to aim, a task made easier by the fact that every weapon is equipped with a laser sight.[citation needed] Lock-on isn't required to shoot enemies, as the laser sight can be aimed freely when in aim mode. Damage to enemies is indicated by three colours, blue to indicate superficial damage to limbs, green for chest for normal damage, and red for a critical headshot. The player can also perform a melee attack while not aiming a weapon, with an instant kill if the enemy has their back turned. The player's movement allows a crouch walk and dodge roll, but is not able to perform actions typical of the action genre such as jumping or climbing over chest high obstacles. There are basic navigation puzzles such as finding keys to progress, and dodging lethal lasers and finding their control box to disarm by shooting.
The game featured a standard multiplayer mode and a Bot mode in the PlayStation 2 version of the game and only in the NTSC versions of the game, where players had access to all of the game's abilities and weapons. At the beginning of the game, all the members of Jean-Luc's team are available as selectable characters, all of them come with a basic handgun as their initial weapon, except for Dan who comes with a unique gun as his main weapon. As the player finished the game or used the cheat code, they will unlock all the bosses and other characters that they had defeated or appeared in story mode. Each boss has a unique weapon that they used in the story mode with infinite ammo.