Firing Weapons and Engaging Enemies

The soldiers in Full Spectrum Warrior are trained to follow orders, to the extent that they won’t even return fire on an enemy unless explicitly instructed to do so (or if they don’t have cover from that enemy). Using your firing reticule, you’ll be able to command each team to fire in one of two different ways, or even order individual soldiers to aim in a different direction from the rest of the their team.

Types of Fire

Point Fire

You’ll be using point fire a lot during Full Spectrum Warrior, as it’s an incredibly simple, yet versatile firing solution for a variety of tactical situations. To issue a point fire order, all you need to do is tap X to bring up your firing cursor, place it where you want it to be, then tap A again to issue the order. What happens next depends on whether or not enemies are present.

You’ll occasionally encounter elevated enemies, so don’t hesitate to lift your reticule off the ground to better encompass possible hostile locations.

If there aren’t any enemies within the firing cursor, your team will go guns-ready on their sector, and will guard that sector against any enemy incursions. If, for example, you order a team to use point fire on an intersection, and your other team’s movement spurs an enemy to run across the road, the point fire team will automatically open up on that enemy and attempt to take him out. They’ll only shoot an enemy if he comes into the firing cursor, though; they won’t shoot anyone outside that cursor, whether the tango is within a clear line of fire, or even if the tango is firing at them. You’ll almost always want to issue a point fire order after moving a team to a seemingly barren stretch of land, since you never know when an enemy will pop out from a corner.

On the other hand, if there are enemies within the targeting reticule, then your team will pop their heads up and fire away. If they’re behind cover when you issue this command, then they’ll remain behind cover as they fire. If your target isn’t behind cover himself, it’s only a matter of time before you take him out; if both you and your target are behind cover, all you can really hope to do is engage the enemy and prevent him from firing on your other team as they move.

Suppression Fire

Pressing and holding the A button while you have a firing cursor up will cause your team to engage in suppression fire. Suppressing an enemy will cause them to duck behind whatever cover they have, and will prevent them from returning fire until the suppression fire ends; thus, suppression fire is best used when you need to move a team across open ground to flank an enemy or to bypass a dangerous opponent.

Unfortunately, suppression fire burns ammo at around twice the rate of normal point fire, and can quickly leave you clicking on empty magazines if you use it too often. There are times when it’s simply impossible to proceed without using suppression fire, however, so don’t feel compelled not to use it in an emergency.

There are two main drawbacks to suppression fire, besides the ammo-chewing aspect. One is that the team that carries out the suppression fire will have to step out from behind their cover in order to best spray bullets across their target area; if there are any Zekes in the area that aren’t covered by your suppression vector, you can expect to see some super slo-mo deaths on the part of your teammates within a few seconds of giving the order. Secondly (and this is more of a warning than a drawback), your non-firing team is perfectly capable of getting shot up by the team that’s firing. You don’t want a team that’s moving to cross the path of a team that’s engaging in suppression fire, or else they’ll all die, and right quick.

Note that you can use suppression fire to let a team cover its own movement. If you open up with suppression fire, then order a movement while your team is still firing, they’ll stop shooting as they move, but enemies will remain pinned for a few seconds after the firestorm stops. This is a great way to move short distances.

Individual Targeting

Any firing command that’s issued normally will, by default, be applied to the entire four-man team. If you wish to split off a single soldier and have him aim at a different direction or use a different fire mode, you can select that soldier with the d-pad, then issue a firing command while holding down the right trigger button. This will cause him to break from the rest of the team and fire according to his own specific instructions. In most cases, however, this won’t be necessary--the game does a good job of automatically allocating your soldiers to the most pressing targets--but you can use this to set up a wider field of point fire than you normally would.