Back in the days of the original Full Spectrum Warrior, things were simple. The game was just plain annoying. It had an attractive feeling, which intensified the obvious oversights in gameplay and realism. I can excuse FSW for its shortcomings, since at the time it was the new kid on the block.

Ten Hammers, on the other hand, has no excuse for keeping around almost everything that held the first game back, yet it does. The mathematical system for determining bullet hits is for the most part unchanged from the first game. On the plus side, it's significantly easier for your troops to hit enemies while they dart between cover. In the original it was very rare for your soldiers to score a kill from anything but the easiest of angles. Since the bullet-system remains otherwise quite unchanged from its prequel, this means that you can expect to be mowed down from long range without ever actually being hit by a bullet. This is supposed to be a game, after all, though this element of the two games seems utterly determined to defeat that good game feeling.

Some notable improvements have been made in other aspects of the game, though. For instance, you can now issue commands to your squads without having to tell them to halt first. This means that you can be setting up for your next move even while your squad is moving. The previous game didn't allow this. Additionally, you can issue orders to one squad while you're viewing the other squad. This makes bounding significantly easier, though this feature seems to replace the original game's built-in "overwatch" ability, where two members of your squad provided cover fire for the other two as they moved. The same thing can be accomplished in Ten Hammers, though it will take a few more button clicks to do so.

Point fire is also dramatically improved in the second iteration of the series, now that your soldiers will actually shoot at things outside the arbitrary ring that designates their "fire sector." In Ten Hammers, this ring acts as a priority zone, and your soldiers will target enemies within it before others. A notable loss from the first game is the ability to give individual fire sectors to each member of your squad. It's not often that this feature would actually be vital in the game, but I don't see why it had to be removed, seemingly an exercise in tactical restriction.

One of the features Ten Hammers introduces you'll be using all the time - the ability to split each of your squads into two two-man "buddy groups." This is an indispensable asset to your endless mission of "fix 'em and flank 'em." In combination with much better level design, this allows you to attack the enemy from twice as many angles as before, without requiring the use of more troops. Honestly, in the first game, two of the members of your fire team were just sitting there idly for most of the time anyway.

Bringing many of these features into one intelligible interface, Ten Hammers introduces a console-inspired menu system, not dissimilar to that found in Battlefield 2, the game where the radial pop-up menu became wildly popular. The system for issuing orders to selected and unselected squads, and furthermore selected and unselected buddy-teams of selected and unselected squads (that phrase has probably lost all meaning to you) is surprisingly logical and intuitive. It will undoubtedly take even the most avid gamer a few levels before the true utility of the interface is fully realized. It combines a very large number of possible combinations of squads and sub-squads compounded with different move-orders into an easily navigable HUD item.

When all is said and done, though, Ten Hammers isn't really all that much different from the previous Full Spectrum Warrior. It's different enough to warrant interest from fans of the first game, though not different enough to offer a new experience to those only casually interested in the tactical military simulation genre (not to confuse this game with a tactical military shooter, because a shooter it is certainly not). If you haven't played FSW, Ten Hammers is certainly a good place to start, because it is an improvement over its predecessor in nearly every aspect. Its main downfall is that it's not improvement enough.