Kuma\War Preview

International military conflicts have been big news recently. Developer Kuma Reality Games knows this and has already begun development on Kuma: War, an episodic, subscription-based action game that will feature missions based on recent, real-life field operations. In fact, at launch, the game's approximately 13 missions will include one based on the recent Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and one based on the hunt for Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay. According to designer Dante Anderson, each mission will take most experienced first-person shooter players "at least a few hours" to complete and will take newer players upward of 10 hours. However, you'll get only three starting missions in the game's box, along with a free one-month trial subscription. Once you get the game installed on your computer, you'll then proceed to download the game's first set of 10 subscriber maps, and every week thereafter, Kuma Reality Games plans to produce an additional mission for download. Each of these missions will be based on a recent or ongoing military operation, though some may be based on hypothetical engagements based on current conditions. At the end of your trial month, you should have about 17 missions to play and four more to follow next month.

Each mission will open with what's described as a "CNN-style" briefing provided by experienced military advisors such as former Major General Tom Wilkerson. These commentators will provide you with an operational analysis of your mission: an overview of the region in which the mission takes place, as well as the number of enemies you can expect to face, along with their armaments and tactics. You'll then be briefed by a fictional "Kuma game analyst" character that will provide you with a more-detailed analysis of the layout of your mission, including where you and your team will drop and your eventual goal, as well as the location of various subgoals along the way. Like in many tactical shooters, Kuma: War's missions will feature multiple objectives that you'll have to complete in succession to unlock further objectives. However, the game definitely won't be a hardcore military simulation with punishing physics or complex team orders.

Kuma: War will have missions that are based directly on real-world military data, including high-resolution satellite photos. Since all of Kuma: War's currently planned scenarios will be urban warfare missions, the design team is currently working on creating art assets for burned-out cities, including damaged buildings, fences, derelict vehicles, and grass and bushes for cover. In order to keep the game accessible at launch, enemies won't have incredibly complex AI routines, but they will instead have an intuitive "vector" area of perception. Essentially, they'll be able to see and hear you and your teammates if you happen to blunder into a preset cone of vision and hearing in front of them, similar to the system in Pyro Studios' Commandos strategy series. And fortunately, you'll be able to direct your teammates (which can be either computer-controlled or human-controlled in multiplayer co-op games) with easy-to-use commands that let you order them to follow, hold their position, or watch over a certain area.

Kuma: War won't have any kind of timer that requires you to complete objectives within a certain time limit (or fail otherwise), which will also help to keep the game accessible. Yet at least some of the game's maps will have scripted events, such as the artillery strike with TOW and KIOWA missiles on the Baath party headquarters that took place in the battle to capture the Hussein brothers on July 22. As you might expect, fighting your way up to the second floor will require you and your teammates to use overwatch tactics and occasionally clear hidden enemies with grenades.

However, the game will have a very lenient physics model for its weapons--there will be next to no barrel-climb on automatic weapons that are fired repeatedly, and although you'll be able to take out your enemies with a clean headshot, the game won't have a complex body-damage model. You'll be able to keep track of your teammates' current condition by way of a set of onscreen portraits on the upper-right corner of the screen that show each soldier's health as a green bar that depletes whenever the soldier takes damage. Multiplayer play will support up to four players at once (the same number of soldiers in a standard US light-infantry fire team). In single-player games, you'll actually be able to change control of your active soldier at any time if you need to coordinate a complex positional maneuver.

Whatever else might be said about it, Kuma: War is clearly based on a very bold, and potentially controversial, premise. Its projected content updates--a new mission every week--also seem extremely ambitious, even though the developer is currently outsourcing a great deal of its production workload to contractors. This unusual game is scheduled for release next year.