Vietcong requires a soft tread, careful aim, and the patience of a born hunter...
The Nam was an even more hazardous place to take a walk, but American soldiers followed orders and did the deed, often reconnoitering their way through booby-trapped and horrifyingly hostile jungle real estate. Vietcong tells the story of a group of those GIs as they push and pull against waves of encroaching Charlies to win the hearts and minds of local villagers and maintain a toehold in an important patch of ground near the Cambodian border. I thoroughly enjoyed those portions of the game that satisfied my years-old urge to actively stalk my prey, to sniff them out with the help of an ARVN guide and snuff them out in a series of furious forest battles.
Vietcong’s creators also included some dark, muted subterranean incursions to give players a glimpse into the claustrophobic and unbelievably treacherous duties of a Tunnel Rat. In addition, the game includes some excellent point-defense segments against a steady supply of VC encroachers. I even enjoyed the peaceful after-action lulls that permitted me to sit back in my bunker, listen to some era-appropriate counterculture tunes, and read up on some genuinely educational field bulletins and weapons specs. However, the best bits, by far, were the pedestrian forays into the green to root out the many pockets of well-armed and – from both a programming and historical point of view – capable adversaries. My AI-controlled squadmates were smart and proficient, and on those rare occasions when they weren’t, they were at least nigh-invincible. Even though my per-mission body count was often higher than all of theirs combined by a factor of four, my troop occasionally impressed me with their realistic actions under fire, leaving me awestruck on one occasion: when we reached the ruined Bahnar village near the end of the game, we were caught out in the open as enemy mortar rounds sprouted from a nearby tangle of trees accessed by a north and south entrance (with a thin trail in-between that I didn’t notice until later). My boys ran north as I ran south, and we met up in the middle. I scored only three cautious kills during that row, while Nhut and the gang plowed through the rest of the VC, finishing up with a very satisfying pincer attack in which the lot of us stamped out the panicky remnants together.
The somewhat linear design of Vietcong’s forest paths don’t always allow for such wide-ranging flanking maneuvers, so many of the other encounters are head-to-head clashes won by the proper use of cover by players who aren’t too proud to crawl on their belly through a ravine. The solo tunneling missions require a lot of patience, what with all the careful cornering and a fair amount of backtracking. I experienced only a few framerate issues with the patched version on my 2.0 GHz P4 with a Radeon 9600, and none at all on my current rig, which runs at a slightly faster frequency with a Radeon X850. Finally, the voice talent was of a very high quality, although the protagonist’s rah-rah game show host style of delivery sometimes grated severely on my nerves. The guy just didn’t look like the jutting-chin Agent Stan Smith type that the can-do vocalizations portrayed, which I believe is more the fault of the voice talent director than the actor. Based on Sergeant Hawkins’ shaggy and lean appearance, I expected – and preferred – more of a staid personality.
Vietcong provides a very solid impression of the isolation and lack of amenities and security faced by a front-line Army unit that must uphold its duties against a confusing enemy that is seldom seen or heard. The game lays out an appreciable amount of turf for those who prefer to do their hunting on the hoof. The settings are often dank and always hostile, but the highlands of Vietnam (and the miles of tunnels threaded through them) provide an excellent backdrop for mayhem.