Marine Heavy Gunner: Vietnam is a budget-priced first-person shooter that combines the seamless narrative style of Half-Life, the computer-controlled squadmates of Vietcong, the fixed-position gunplay of Beachhead, and Max Payne's over-the-top tough-guy dialogue. It's also filled with overheated, deranged metaphors, such as "Half of these jokers were doing the backstroke six feet under and had no idea, trying out for the swim team of the soon to be dead." That all might sound great, but unfortunately, Marine Heavy Gunner's actual execution leaves a lot to be desired. For what it's worth, though, the game does feature a really impressive amount of heavy-duty swearing.
You play as Grant, a marine heavy gunner who, along with a squad of seven other soldiers, must infiltrate a North Vietnamese prison camp to rescue some American POWs. The game's most remarkable feature is the way the story plays out. Rather than break everything into discrete levels, the game flows more or less seamlessly from your initial helicopter insertion to the final extraction. You have the sense of experiencing an actual event rather than a series of disjointed action scenes.
Gameplay is split into three basic types. There are extended on-rail sections in which you man a gun mounted on various vehicles such as a helicopter, an armored personnel carrier, and a boat. These sections have neither the breakneck urgency nor the cool scripted set pieces seen in the best examples of on-rail levels from games such as Call of Duty or the Medal of Honor series. Like pretty much everything in Marine Heavy Gunner, they're functional at best.
At certain predetermined points, you'll attach the heavy machine gun you're carrying to a fixed position and then blast away at waves of incoming attackers. The rest of the game is spent on foot, and much of the time you'll be accompanied by the members of your squad. As implemented, the squad mechanic feels incomplete. Teammates appear to move in prescripted patterns. Sometimes they'll shoot at enemies; sometimes they'll ignore them completely. Since squad members can't be hurt or killed (except as part of the plot), there isn't any incentive to protect anyone. Your fellow marines will occasionally manage to kill an enemy, but for the most part, they're just window dressing. The exceptions are one teammate that carries extra ammunition and another who's a medic. These two soldiers act as walking health and ammo crates from which you can resupply whenever necessary.
The jungle setting doesn't provide much tension, largely because you're equipped with a radar that shows the position of every nearby enemy. In fairness, you can turn off the radar in the options menu. Though, it probably should have been turned off by default. Regardless, the game's enemy artificial intelligence is spotty. Occasionally, the AI will appear to do something smart like retreat to cover, though usually they'll run right at you, often straight through a gauntlet of your teammates.
The game uses the Unreal engine, though you'd be hard pressed to tell that it uses any sort of modern rendering technology. From both a technical and artistic standpoint, the game's visuals are its weakest part. The curtain of fog that we all hoped had been mothballed two or three years ago is back with a vengeance. What isn't obscured by gray mist is generally washed out and painted from a palette of what looks to be one of four or five lifeless textures. There seems to be some sort of basic physics system in place, but it doesn't appear to be completely functional. For instance, an enemy killed on any kind of platform will tend to fall straight through it rather than off of it.
The voice acting is of the so-bad-it's-good variety. Whoever did the voice work is a master of dialects, but is evidently incapable of maintaining the same dialect for two lines in a row. Some characters switch from being Southern to British to Indian within the span of a few sentences. Coupled with the terrible dialogue and the nonstop swearing, you may start to look forward to every speaking part. Especially noteworthy is the vicious taunting you'll receive from the Vietcong, who repeatedly scream things like "F*** you Uncle Sam," "F*** you Yankee pig," and the truly unforgettable, "F*** you American blue jean!"
As a pure, seven-hour-long shooting gallery, Marine Heavy Gunner has its moments. But so do a thousand other games, many of which also sport multiplayer modes--something this game lacks. Ultimately, like many budget titles, this one's the poor man's version of its full-priced competition. However, the savings in cost simply isn't worth the significant discrepancy in quality.
