Full Spectrum Warrior review

"We’re under heavy fire," shouts one of Alpha team as relentless enemy fire confines them to the backside of beaten-up old banger, bullets ricocheting around them. The car buckles under the torrent of bullets, its bumper clanging noisily to the floor. They need help, and they need it now.

Backup comes in the form of Bravo team, who move up to a nearby corner and lay down some suppressing fire on the entrenched enemy, causing them to duck down behind cover. Taking advantage of the respite Bravo team have granted them, Alpha team run across to a low wall parallel to the now pinned-down enemy. A well placed grenade forces quickly dispatches their helpless foe with ruthless efficiency.

Full Spectrum Warrior is title that depicts modern urban combat with more authenticity and ferociousness than has been previously seen in a video game. By turns tense and stressful, exhilarating and frustrating, this no-nonsense depiction of street warfare at grunt level certainly won’t have me rushing down to my local army recruitment centre anytime soon.

Battle Hardened

For those who missed the hype surrounding the Xbox version, here’s a recap. FSW sees you using two four-man teams to negotiate a series of middle-eastern modelled urban environments. The difference between this game and other squad-based shooters is the use of chain of command.

Instead of taking direct control of your troops, you issue orders to the team leaders, via simple context sensitive control system. For example if you place the movement cursor behind a car and your squad will take cover behind it. Firing is also kept simple, with a button click assigning a sector for a squad to concentrate their aim on.

It’s easy to command both teams as the controls are kept to the bare minimum, with the soldiers doing all the hard work for you. The ensuing fire-fights are always dramatic standoffs, which require you to use your two teams in conjunction to break the stale-mate. The central tactical dynamic of the game is using one team to suppress the enemy whilst the other flanks them. Good use of grenades can also get you out a few tight spots.

Grunt-eye view

Your view is tied to your team leaders. This may seem a bit restrictive, but it keeps with the realism of the rest of the game; you can only see what your men can. The only time the camera slips up is when you can’t quite position the cursor where you want it to, but such instances are relatively rare. For the most part, the controls are intuitive and fuss free and your team act out their orders in an efficient, intelligent manner, allowing you to get on with making the tactical decisions without having to micromanage.

The combat itself both looks and sounds real. Whilst the graphical detail can’t quite rival the PC’s best, a number of strong effects give FSW an impressive visual sheen. An especially nice touch is the way that objects in the distance appear slightly blurry, as if taking into account the imperfections of the human eye. When combined with excellent speaker-shaking sound and the bombastic score, the overall feeling of immersion is intense.

Black Hawk Down

Unfortunately the game's presentation is tarnished by some clipping problems. This is most apparent when you move one team through another, as they do literally move through each other, as if they were ghosts. Whilst this concession may have helped the developers simplify the path finding, in a game prides itself on realism such laziness sticks out like a sore thumb; after all we’re not playing Full Spectre Warrior.

A more annoying problem arises from the randomness of war. You can’t keep your troops behind cover forever if you want to make progress, and this mean traversing open terrain. No matter how cautious you are, there will be occasions when you can’t cover every angle or account for every enemy position. Your soldiers will take fire and will inevitably get hit. This may be realistic but it is also quite frustrating, especially when you’ve made no errors in your implementation. Thankfully it is possible to pick wounded soldiers up off the battlefield and carry them to safety. Successfully rescuing one of your men is one of the most satisfying experiences that FSW offers.

Another criticism, which becomes apparent when you start repeating failed sections, is that the AI is heavily scripted. Enemies almost always run to the same place in response to you movement. Some even run out into the open street, not bothering to seek cover even when fired upon.

Even when they do retreat it still looks scripted, as if you had trod on some invisible pressure pad that had told them to fall back to another area. Okay, so you’re not meant to be up against an organised enemy army, but some rudimentary intelligence wouldn’t go amiss. It’s definitely an area that requires some improvement in the inevitable sequel.

Shellshock

Despite its simple control system, Full Spectrum Warrior is a tough and uncompromising soldier sim, which requires careful planning, clear strategies and perfect timing in order to succeed. Relentless, exhausting and unique, although Full Spectrum Warrior is certainly one of the most innovative strategy games we’ve played for some time, it’s not always a wholly satisfying one- it often feels too much like hard work. Good, but not quite the classic it could have been.