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Full Spectrum Warrior
This title has
dominated my days and nights recently since I first threw it into the
PS2. With the amount of games that I am privileged to play, it's
actually not that many that hold my attention as much as this one has.
What's it about? Well let me tell ya!
This brilliant game
is a strategy title that is so far out of the box that it isn't funny.
Why? Well for one, it's a strategy title that isn't boring! Secondly the
perspective you get is totally different from what we've come to be used
to. Your vantage point in this game is from a third person perspective,
unlike the top down views of some other games.
You control two
teams being Alpha and Bravo respectively. The nice part of this game is
the way that it forces you to think as a commander of two elite teams,
using one team to provide cover for the other. The game opens with a
training session that I thoroughly recommend you try out. The title is
easy enough to play and the controls make sense and are easy to use,
however they certainly are not intuitive and you will get drilled as
soon as you try to play. The training does take a fair amount of time to
get through, however it will make you all the more keen to get out there
and have a good crack at it with the new skills that you are getting
under your belt.
I've only three
complaints about this title and I will get them out of the way right
now. As you can already see if you scrolled down, I'm still scoring this
7.9/10 so it really hasn't troubled me overall, yet I am compelled to
report. First off there is only cooperative mode in multiplayer, add to
that, multiplayer is only available with Live support, there should have
been the option of one player controlling Alpha and the other
controlling Bravo from a split screen perspective. As soon as I'd got
into the game, I got a mate over to play and found out the hard way that
we were not playing it together that day.
Second, I thought
there was not enough use of grenades on the part of the enemy. Many was
the time when I could flush some of the enemy out or into oblivion with
some well placed grenades. The emphasis is primarily about taking down
an a static enemy for the most part and how you can utilise two trained
teams to take out even heavily fortified structures. It's a damn clever
game that I could not put down once I had finished.
Finally having seen
the Xbox version of this game I was actually fairly upset by how much
the graphic quality of the title was dumbed down to run on the PS2.
Whilst the graphics on the Xbox are absolutely sweet, the PS2 suffers
from framerate chopping to the point that some of the gameplay is a
little bit hard at times to make snap decisions in the heat of battle.
That doesn't occur all the time though.
Action takes place
in Zekistan, a fictional Middle Eastern Area where you are given
assignments to clear out a certain area or take a person captive etc as
you make your way through the action with your squads. There is a
realism to the environments that really shows through, even on this
version of the game. It's surprising the level of detail that has gone
into making it as real as possible. Though when you take into account
that Pandemic actually made this to be a trainer for US troops and then
dolled it up for the rest of us to enjoy, it makes sense that the
government would want to try to make environments as true to real life
as possible.
I would have to say
that you should give Full Spectrum Warrior a shot, it's a tough call to
make as I absolutely loved it, but I would have to say that the XBox
version of it killed this one but that might have tainted my experience
playing this. I'd have no troubles giving the XBox version of this game
a 9.8 but I think that I have to go for a 7.9 on this version, and then
even go so far as to say some might want to rent first. The experience
is awesome but framerates and non coop modes might distance some from
the game. Add to that the fact that you really are not going to play
this over and over and it simply might not be an attractive proposition
for a purchase.
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