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Full Spectrum Warrior Review for Xbox
Posted on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 @ 01:36:53 am E.S.TBravo team leader Williams is wounded and needs medical attention ASAP, but unfortunately for him the nearest CASEVAC is 5 clicks north of your position. There also happens to be a lot of RPG-toting tangos along the way, and they aren’t exactly thrilled about these leathernecks putting the kibosh on their oppressive regime. Meanwhile, Alpha team is under heavy fire and their cover is being torn to shreds. That’s what happens when the only cover they could find in the heat of battle is a withered wooden box. It’s up to you to guide these US soldiers to the completion of their mission, while making sure no man gets left behind. What do you do? If you don’t know, don’t worry about it—Full Spectrum Warrior will teach you. This so-authentic-it’s-educational strategy game, after all, was originally a true-life simulator for the US military before Pandemic Studios adapted it to the Xbox. This approach created a kind of unique situation: the game’s roots as a simulator fills it to the brim with fantastic authenticity, but it turns out that the original simulator wasn’t exactly overflowing with gameplay depth and variety.
Now if you’re looking for your next first-person-shooter fix, don’t be fooled by Full Spectrum Warrior’s FPS camouflage; this game has more in common with something like Command & Conquer than Rainbow Six 3. FSW is strictly a strategy game where you command two fire-teams (Alpha and Bravo), each composed of four soldiers. You can switch between the two teams at any time, and give them orders with an interface that’s sort of similar to a real-time-strategy game, and generally works quite well. You move an icon along the ground to indicate where you want to move your selected fire-team, and you can issue your team “fire sectors,” which basically tells them to blast away at any OPFOR (army lingo for bad guys) that cross their designated sector. Everything plays out in real-time, which makes it interesting to discover that FSW actually has certain “rules” more akin to turn-based or table-top strategy games.
The most important rule is that when any infantry is “behind cover” (noted when a small shield icon appears over them), they are impervious. Waste as much ammo as you want, you simply will never hit an enemy if the game deems that they have cover, and it works the same for your troops too. So when it comes down to your soldiers and a tango exchanging fire, with both sides behind their invincible cover, you usually only have two options. The one you’ll use the most is coordinating your two teams so that one keeps the enemy busy by laying down covering fire, then using the other team to flank the enemy’s position and get a bead on him from an unprotected angle. Alternatively, you could use grenades (either thrown or shot out of an M203 launcher) to kill or at least flush out the entrenched tango. But again, you’ll be using option one the most since you have a limited supply of grenades.
Surprisingly, there’s not much more to FSW’s gameplay than that, which is the game’s largest shortcoming. The first few missions will feel really exhilarating. You’ll be leading your squads with surgical precision, flanking enemy after enemy while feeling like a badass military tactician all the while. But by the 30th entrenched enemy that you flank, things start to feel a little stale. The more you play the game, the more you realize that each mission is essentially an obstacle course, almost puzzle-game-like in nature, in which you negotiate your way along the very deliberately arranged cover to try and find the best path through the mission. There is an Xbox Live cooperative mode—where two players can play through each mission, each controlling one of the two teams—that adds some life to the game once the single-player campaign begins to get old. But while the added layer of complexity (what with having to communicate with your partner to coordinate your two team’s movements) does mix things up a bit, this too eventually starts feeling monotonous after playing a few missions.
The game’s narrow scope certainly doesn’t help shake the repetitious feeling, either. FSW is entirely focused on infantry combat in outdoor urban locations, which means you’ll never leave the middle-eastern setting (woodland combat with real life strategies specific to that location would have added gargantuan variety), and you’ll never even get to enter and fortify any of the many buildings that constantly surround you. And while there are many vehicles moving around your fire-teams (humvees, tanks, helicopters, etc.), you never get control over them. They only move in scripted sequences that barely interact with your soldiers, such as clearing a street of RPG-toting enemies so that a caravan of tanks and humvees can roll by. The severely limited scale of the gameplay makes FSW a surprisingly shallow game. “About Twenty Percent of the Spectrum Warrior” would have been a more fitting title.
One other problem with FSW’s gameplay is that the real-time nature of the game tied with the more turn-based oriented rules creates a sometimes confusing juxtaposition. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the game ordaining that cover makes a unit invincible. Many turn-based strategy games have rules that are, if you think about it, just as arbitrary. But when the game plays out in real time, and you actually see the enemy lean out from behind a corner to fire a few shots, it seems absurd that your highly-trained commandos can’t pick him off. It’s not just a problem with suspending your disbelief either, since it can be difficult to judge what angles a piece of cover will protect you and your enemies from. You’ll sometimes move one of your teams to a position you’re sure gives them a clear shot at an enemy, only to see that they still haven’t conquered the bad guy’s cover. Or you’ll move a team to a new position and already be thinking ahead to your next three moves, but find that this new location is apparently far enough to kill your target. There just isn’t enough clear-cut consistency in the gameplay, which can sometimes make it annoying guesswork.
The one thing FSW gets startlingly right, though, is the atmosphere of modern combat. The game renders a war-torn middle-eastern setting with astounding realism. The cities your soldiers get deployed into are made of dilapidated buildings and run-down shacks, with bullet-riddled abandoned cars and other miscellaneous debris filling the streets. Sand flows all around, kicked up by a soldier’s moving feet, a tank’s treads, or a helicopter’s rotor. When you move a team to a new location, the camera follows behind in a simulated hand-held manner that makes it feel like you’re tagging right along with them in the battlefield. Every mission does generally look the same since the game sticks to one setting, but at least this one setting looks great.
And the audio is even better than the visuals. Each soldier is a unique character with his own personality, and the dialogue is the most genuine army-speak you’ll hear in a video game. These soldiers communicate in military code and shorthand, just like real soldiers would. They curse a lot, with absolutely no qualms about letting go some f-bombs, and why shouldn’t they? If your life were in immediate danger, keeping your language clean probably wouldn’t be your highest priority. The authenticity of FSW’s setting and atmosphere makes you realize just how tame many purportedly “realistic” military games are.
Yet for all the realism in the audio and visuals, it’s funny how the gameplay in Full Spectrum Warrior just isn’t as deep or as varied as a GBA game like Advance Wars. But while Full Spectrum Warrior may not be the deepest or most varied strategy game available, it’s still a lot of fun for the first few hours (which is more entertainment than a lot of games offer), and military-freaks will definitely get a kick out of the awesome presentation. Now if Pandemic Studios makes a sequel with a wider scope and deeper gameplay, it could really be a strategy game fan’s dream. Surely the United State’s military has more elaborate training simulations, right? Review By: Kris Pigna - 2395 Reads
Full Spectrum Warrior Review Scores for Xbox :
| Gameplay |
| 7.0 |
| Graphics |
| 9.0 |
| Sound |
| 10 |
| Replay |
| 4.5 |
| Overall |
| 7 |
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