Full Spectrum Warrior

Full Spectrum Warrior comes to gamers courtesy of the American Army, which originally ordered the game as a military simulator to teach their troops close urban combat ordering techniques. Many gamers looking for a straight up military action/shooter may find Full Spectrum Warrior a little puzzling; but that's because it's neither type of game. Unlike so many other military games, you don't in fact fire a single bullet, although you can order your soldiers to fire within zones, and to play with grenades, something we were always taught was a bad thing. Maybe that was just a bad thing in a primary school setting. Instead, what Full Spectrum Warrior boils down to is more akin to a puzzle game with relatively strict boundaries - Tetris with lots of dead guys, in effect.

The plot in Full Spectrum Warrior is pretty arbitrary, but that's to be expected for a game based on a tool originally written to train US army soldiers in urban combat techniques. There's not great unrequited love, no mystical sword with the power to heal the seven hidden crystals, and no princesses hiding in the next castle here - you're essentially just shooting at enemies at a suitably vague middle eastern country - Zekistan in this case. Just that semi-fictional setting will be enough to make some people uncomfortable, as will the realistic and rather strong language that your soldiers use in combat.

Your primary control mechanism boils down to an onscreen cursor which you use to position your soldiers and move them around the urban war zones they'll find themselves battling in. The positioning cursor constantly shifts contextually, and as such it'll shift into a variety of shapes depending on where you move your squad. One of the first things you'll learn in basic training is the importance of cover - soldiers out in the open make great corpses, after all. So Full Spectrum Warrior  --we're presuming the title means a warrior with a full spectrum of capabilities, and not one who's just ingested a Spectrum ZX computer, rubber keyboard and all -- could have also been titled 'Duck and Cover Simulator'. All the time while you're working out where to move to next in order to complete your mission objectives, you're also keenly moving the positioning cursor around to check out cover areas and formation possibilities.

Full Spectrum Warrior's controls feel a little unwieldy at first, but that's because developers Pandemic have opted to try for more of a real world feel - you can only see up to the limits of the human neck and the direction that your squad member's heads are facing. That's accentuated by a strict fog of war effect that you can impose on your crew in order to work out where they're not in fact looking. Why would you want to impose a fog of war, you ask? Well, because your troops only look where you tell them, and an area that was clear when they visually swept it may no longer be clear. The fog of war essentially shows you where you're vulnerable to enemy ambush.

It's not a perfect illusion - you can zoom in the view with a tap of the L button - and it's something that many gamers fed a diet of military war games may find hard to come to grips with. There are instances where the lack of camera freedom can annoy, as you'll find situations where it's hard to accurately order your team around obstacles due to the lack of a free roaming camera. Here, a little bit of unreality works in your favour. With the exception of some very loose cover - crates, signs and the like - most cover is permanent and will stop any bullet, no matter how close the foe. As such, you can blunder quite a bit early on and get away with it - at least at the default difficulty setting, anyway.

There are two major factors that may turn some gamers away from Full Spectrum Warrior. Firstly, you've got to deal with the fact that Full Spectrum Warrior wasn't designed as a game per se, and as such the initial training sessions that you undergo won't just familiarise you with the controls; they'll show you absolutely everything the game has to offer. As such, you won't hit that many real 'surprises' within each mission, and it's not as though you'll unlock any extra weapons or magic armour. The second strike against Full Spectrum Warrior is that it does ultimately boil down to puzzle solving; enemy actions are quite heavily scripted and there's not a lot of room to play around with solutions. It's quite an engaging experience the first time through, but we're not sure it's a title that every player will return to for more squad-controlling fun.

There's a big friendly sticker on the front of the Full Spectrum Warrior case that indicates that it's Xbox Live compatible, but rather like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, this isn't just another online deathmatch mode. Online play splits up the two squads you normally control between two players, who need to communicate between headsets to work their way through the otherwise single player campaign. In theory, it sounds like a great idea, but we hit one major snag - we couldn't find anyone online willing to join us in some play sessions. It's certainly not a title that would readily lend itself to deathmatch-style shenanigans in any case.

The visual presentation in Full Spectrum Warrior is generally top notch. Because you're not individually controlling soldiers per se, you've got plenty of time to watch your soldiers as they patrol, and there's plenty of battle animation to revel in. Enemy animation isn't quite as good, and the aforementioned permanent cover problem is a bit of an illusion shatterer, but there's no doubting that Full Spectrum Warrior succeeds admirably in portraying a modern urban combat scene. We never thought that thirty shades of brown could look so good.

Full Spectrum Warrior's audio reverberates with plenty of realistic weapon sounds - which in a game originally commissioned by the US military is as it should be - and a few random bits of scored music that don't really add that much. What you will notice, however, is how chatty your squads are, and how strong their language is. It could be argued that the strong language is entirely contextual - we're not sure how calm we'd be if we were constantly under fire - but it pretty much makes it a title to leave out of the hands of younger players.

If you just want to shoot things and watch them fall over, you'll find Full Spectrum Warrior a frustrating experience. If you're more interested in the strategy side of controlling troops, though, you'll find Full Spectrum Warrior an interesting little game. It's not entirely flawless, and we're not sure that long term playability is really there (even with the original rough cut US Army version as a hidden extra), but THQ and Pandemic do deserve commendation for stepping away from the tried and tested styles of military simulations and trying something different.

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