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| Full Spectrum Warrior (Xbox) by Fussbett 07/24/2004, 2:42pm PDT | ||||
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| Full Spectrum Warrior is an E. L. Koba simulator. As team leader of a dismounted light infantry fireteam, you must clear the streets of a thinly disguised Iraq by eliminating the OpFors. You control two (and occasionally three) fireteams of 4 soldiers each. Team leader, heavy machinegun guy, grenade launcher guy, and a dude with a normal rifle. Here's the catch: you don't directly control anyone. You see the action through an embedded reporter camera lens, and you merely issue commands to the squad. Go over there, throw a grenade, lay down supressing fire, shoot at that guy. If two of your men get Ungered, you lose, start over. It's a turn based combat game done in realtime and it feels really fresh when you first get into it. You soon realize that the job of being a HERO and saving the world has been boiled down to a situation-based puzzle game. In fact, by the end of the first level, I loved the Army, I love killing foreigners, I loved my squadmates, and I was ready to go to Iraq and help out in person. I was sure that not only would I be a great team leader, but that I surely knew more than Koba at this point. Set up one team on a corner, lay down supressing fire and advance the second team into a flanking position. As long as you're behind cover, you'll never die. IT'S SO EASY. I've been through hell and back, while Koba has only been in a couple of light dust ups.
Then the bad news. This game is more of an army simulation than I first suspected. Soon, military drudgery and repetition set in and Full Spectrum Warrior begins to feel like a job. Joining the army may sound fun at first -- the guns, the explosions, the nicknames -- but for every dirty pagan you kill there are five latrines to clean and 1000 push-ups to push. Full Spectrum Warrior is the same way with the great setup, giving way to chores and exercises. Soon you learn that AI sits entrenched or retreats, no matter what happens. You never bother checking your 6, you don't worry about getting flanked. You go street to street solving scripted situational puzzles (usually by throwing smoke grenades to cover your movement) and sadly that's it. Throw smoke or lay down supressing fire, move, repeat. GIMMIE TWENTY, MAGGOT! It gets worse as I experienced what the developers must have included as an example of what veterans sardonically refer to as "Army Logic". Some completely FUBAR choices like unabortable cutscenes, finnicky controls that make me jostle my guys around inside small "casevac" rings to get more ammo and health, and some weird pacing. Pacing problems like level 3 where you:
That's 15 minutes of my real life spent not even really playing. The developer is telling me here that my time is less valuable than their time. Rather than make one overall cutscene to get my back into the action quickly they said "Let Fussbett run his little soliders all the way back to the next cutscene point. That's better than us spending more time fixing this section." This is the price of developing something new. There really is no game like Full Spectrum Warrior, so it's not shocking they made some mistakes along the way. Soon someone will make a game that will build upon the supressing fire FSW laid down for us, and it will be awesome. In the meantime we have Full Spectrum Warrior which is a combination of groundbreaking and broken. A highly recommended rental, stop playing when you're bored, leave with a positive attitude! |
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Full Spectrum Warrior (Xbox) by 07/24/2004, 2:42pm PDT  Anyone try the sequel, Ten Hammers? by 08/27/2014, 8:57pm PDT Thanks for the heads up. 35 games are going to be gone on Tuesday. by 08/28/2014, 6:27pm PDT This new interface sucks by 08/30/2014, 7:35pm PDT Ten years ;_; NT by 08/28/2014, 7:25pm PDT |
