Kuma\War Hands-On Impressions

Military-themed first-person shooters like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down are some of the most popular online games on the market. The combination of action and realism, presented in modern-day settings, is especially appealing to a generation weaned on realistic war movies like Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. Kuma: War aims to capitalize on the popularity of these games, and it's certainly one of the most ambitious action games of its kind. We recently had a chance to play with the game to gather some hands-on impressions.

Kuma: War is a subscription-based action game that will let you download a new mission each week. More often than not, these missions are based on recent, real-world military operations in the ongoing war on terror. Most of the first missions deal with US Army battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Operation Red Dawn, which is the raid that captured Saddam Hussein, and the July 22 raid that resulted in the deaths of Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay. Kuma's designers are confident of being able to create new battles on a weekly basis by using high resolution satellite photographs to help design levels, in addition to drawing on reports (from the Department of Defense and from news organizations) to flesh them out.

Each new mission will come with upward of 25 pages of briefing material, including satellite photos, histories of the units involved, information on weapons, and analysis from Kuma's military consultants. The briefing will also feature DoD photographs of the battles--the kind rarely seen by most civilians--as well as video footage and photographs from news organizations such as the Associated Press and foreign television. And to sum it all up, there will be a video briefing of the battle, hosted by VH1's Tad Low (the creator of the popular Pop Up Video program) and game analyst Jax.

After you digest the intel and background material, you can go straight in to battle. Each battle will support both single-player and multiplayer modes. In the single-player game, you'll command a squad of four GIs. Your AI buddies will follow you faithfully and will engage the enemy; you can even give them simple commands, such as hold and follow. Furthermore, you can switch to any member of the squad by using the corresponding function (F1 to F4) key, which becomes useful when you need to take control of the soldier who's carrying the sniper rifle or the grenade launcher, among other weapons.

The first level we played was a re-creation of the raid that killed Uday and Qusay. The level actually presented us with several different mission objectives. In order to work our way up to Saddam's sons, we were required to eliminate various insurgent leaders. Kuma: War's urban combat tends to be brutal, and in this mission, shots seemed to come from all directions. Fortunately, the game's difficulty level is a bit forgiving, so you can use health packs to replenish your soldiers' health. The second level is based on Operation Anaconda, in which you hunt Taliban and Al Queda enemies in the mountains of Afghanistan. This environment is much more wide-open than the narrow streets of Iraqi towns, so the emphasis is on long-range engagement. There's definitely a greater sense of warfare, since Apache gunships pass overhead and mortars and artillery explode in the distance.

The game is played primarily from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective, which gives you greater peripheral vision for seeing the battlefield. Your soldiers will constantly look around while scanning for targets. Fans of first-person shooters will be happy to know that you can switch to a first-person view, though this mode is very reminiscent of the early Rainbow Six games. You'll see a targeting reticle, but your weapon isn't rendered on the screen. The way in which the game models weapons falls somewhere between realistic and arcadelike. The M-16, for instance, is a bit inaccurate at long range, which is realistic. On the other hand, the sniper rifle is incredibly deadly because the scope doesn't sway at all from your soldier's breathing or movement. There's also no recoil when you fire, which lets you lock onto a target and allows you to keep firing until the target is down. You can recover weapons on the ground, including enemy ones, so we were able to pick up an RPG launcher and subsequently used it to clear out heavily defended buildings.

Small-scale tactics are obviously much more effective in multiplayer, especially compared to the relatively basic squad AI found in the single-player game. We saw human teammates who were able to maneuver down a narrow Iraqi street in a leapfrog formation, with two members of the team providing cover while the other two leapt ahead. Each mission will be playable in multiplayer, either cooperatively against the AI or in team-versus-team play. We noticed that some of the environment textures seemed a bit plain, and we also noticed that our computer-controlled squadmates sometimes seemed to have pathfinding issues. However, the Kuma: War client will apparently be updated regularly to fix issues like these. According to designer Dante Anderson, every time you download a new mission, you'll also get the latest features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

It will be interesting to see if Kuma's designers can meet the ambitious schedule of producing a new level weekly. There's certainly no shortage of potential subject matter. Additional missions will include the ambush at Samara, where a well-organized group of Iraqi insurgents unsuccessfully tried to ambush a US convoy. There are tentative plans for an open beta test for Kuma: War in the coming weeks, and the game will ship soon thereafter.