If you're looking for a unique and authentic military simulation, then give Full Spectrum Warrior a try.
User Rating: 7.6 | Full Spectrum Warrior PC
Full Spectrum Warrior provides a very refreshing and unique perspective on realistic, modern, small scale warfare. Normally, this would be the realm of first person shooters. However, these types of games can have a steep learning curve or be very frustrating. Full Spectrum Warrior takes a different approach, and offers a tactics game that requires virtually no skills or reflexes. This idea works very well. It also manages to be authentic, without being overly difficult. Thus, if you have an interest in the subject matter, you should give this game a try. The game is very simple, so you should pick up and be playing it in no time. You control two fire teams. They do basically two things – move and shoot. About 90% of the game is spent doing some variety of this. You don’t control individual soldiers. Rather, you control the teams as a whole, four at a time. The gameplay primarily involves moving your soldiers from one area of cover to another, while finding an advantageous spot to shoot enemies who are also hiding behind cover. Cover almost guarantees that you will be safe. Getting caught in the open is a death sentence, so you also spend a lot of time using one team to cover the advance of another. Sometimes, you have to avoid a well-covered enemy using a machine gun, or even a tank, but most of the gameplay involves “move-and-cover” in some way or another. The game also has frag grenades and smoke grenades, the former of which doesn’t come into play very often. Smoke grenades are useful, and essential in some spots, since they help you traverse open terrain if covering fire is not available. If you are behind cover, then you are impossible to hit. Likewise, if an enemy is behind cover, you could empty ten clips into his direction and still not hit him. This feature of the game is essential, because it turns the game into a tactical exercise, and renders your hand-eye coordination irrelevant. This is one way in which the realism of the game falls a bit short. Another way is the way that one of your soldiers can go from completely incapacitated to fully healthy in about ten seconds if you get him to a medic. Both of these contrivances take a little bit of getting used to, but once you do, you won’t mind. I found one of the little disappointments of this game to be the graphics. The visuals for this game are above average, at best, and highly overrated. The PC version looks better than the X-Box version, but that’s not saying much. It’s still vastly inferior to the top games out there, like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Half-Life 2, Painkiller, and Doom 3 (to name but a few). Character models and animations are good, but detail level is low everywhere you go, and texture quality is very 2001-like. The buildings, especially, look very mediocre. Games like Half-Life 2 have proven that even run-down, drab areas can look amazing. Full Spectrum Warrior definitely does not. The visuals for this game scream “console port!” The audio is the best part of the game. Your squad is loaded with sound bites and commentary. Each of your commands to the troops is barked out inspiringly by the fire team leader. Hearing the team leader order the troops around while they complain about how hot it is one of the things that makes this game so enjoyable. All of your troops are likeable, and they all look and sound different from one another. The music for the game was a nice surprise. There is a low key score that usually picks up and becomes more dramatic when the action starts. The music, voice acting, and style of the game add up to an excellent presentation that almost carries the game. The interface and commands system is very easy to pick up and use, but movement is occasionally frustrating when you can’t get your guys to move where you want them to go. What keeps this from being a truly great game is its lack of depth and an aggravating reliance on trial-and-error. Full Spectrum Warrior is guilty of repeating the same mechanics too often: Encounter enemy, suppressing fire, flank, kill, repeat. There are a few missions that provide some welcome variety, like one that lets you control a couple of snipers who can hit enemies behind cover. Moments like these will make you wish that they came more often. The biggest problem with Full Spectrum Warrior might be that it is extremely ambush-heavy – a trait made all the more annoying by the fact that it has a checkpoint save system. There are some tactics that you can use to minimize your risk, but ultimately, you’re going to get killed the first time that you enter a lot of areas. The game is extremely short for a strategy game. You can probably complete the main campaign in just over 10 hours. The PC version has a couple of extra levels, but they are very poorly designed and were probably filler that didn’t make the original cut. The game is linear and tightly scripted, so you're probably not going to want to replay it all that badly. However, that’s not enough of a shortcoming to not recommend the game. “Full Spectrum Warrior” sets out to immerse you in The Middle East and command a squad of soldiers through the streets in a manner as realistically as possible. It accomplishes its mission well.
