The first Gulf War lasted only three months, but you won't want to play Conflict: Desert Storm for nearly that long. In the game, you play as Privates Foley and Bradley, two soldiers who must be separately guided through each level like monopoly pieces, unless you enable an automatic follow command for your second operative. Both soldiers have several weapons, including a bazooka, a Desert Eagle handgun, some grenades, and a medpac. Both men can move and fire in eight directions, and they can walk through a ridiculous amount of enemy fire. The Iraqi forces apparently aren't so well padded, as they perish with a single hit, regardless of the distance from which your weapon was fired. Conflict: Desert Storm suffers from poor presentation and tedious gameplay.
You begin the game as Bradley, braving enemy lines to rescue the handlebar-mustachioed Foley, who's being held in a repurposed mosque. After a teary reunion, the two men head off to prevent the Iraqis from penetrating the Kuwait border. You can enable a follow command for your second soldier, making him prance blindly behind until you encounter an enemy. He'll then automatically return fire, like a human gun turret. The result is a game that plays a lot like last year's Rainbow Six 3 mobile, but without the strategy, the decent friendly AI, or the fun.
From your isometric perspective, Bradley and Foley look identical on the N-Gage QD, except for in their character portraits. Motion is conveyed through two ridiculous frames of animation, which gives the impression that a small child is furiously speed-walking on stilts in an attempt to move a soldier outfit at a realistic speed. From different perspectives, these animations look even worse. When moving along at an orthogonal angle, your soldiers appear to cross their legs, as if they were moving in two separate directions. When riding in humvees, you won't encounter these problems, but you will be bored by the on-rails shooting action.
Even if they can ignore their soldiers' wacky legs, grognards will be galled by the laser blasts emitted by Foley and Bradley's Desert Eagle handguns. These orange aberrances produce concurrent screeching noises (weapon noises are the only sounds in the game), and make Conflict: Desert Storm look like Conflict: Tatooine.
Conflict: Desert Storm is seriously flawed by design, and should be avoided by wargamers, action fans, and any Venn diagram overlap. With its boring, simplistic gameplay and ludicrous visuals, Desert Storm is several orders less thrilling than toppling dictatorships in real life.
