Full Spectrum Warrior
Xbox, PC, £35/£45, THQ/Pandemic
It became apparent during the first Gulf war that American soldiers were being needlessly exposed to the risk of death and serious injury through lack of training in urban combat. Realising that this mode of fighting was likely to become even more prevalent, the US army decided to educate recruits in military operations in urban terrain (or Mout).
In a seemingly unrelated observation, top brass noticed that many soldiers spent their spare time playing video games, and reasoned that a good way of keeping GIs drilled in urban warfare would be to get the games industry involved and createsoftware that let soldiers practise their fighting skills without sending them on expensive training courses.
To facilitate this, the army founded the Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT) to bridge the gap between the old soldiers at the Pentagon and the rather more wayward electronic entertainment industry. ICT briefed Californian developer Pandemic, which has spent the past four years building Full Spectrum Warrior, which, with a few tweaks to pump up the action and make the interface more accessible, is now available to all armchair gunnery sergeants.
Although it is all about war, Full Spectrum Warrior's first surprise is that as a player, you never have to pull a trigger, focusing instead on keeping your men alive through cunning use of tactics. Controlling two fire teams, Alpha and Bravo, your job is to move them around the battlefield, assigning fire sectors and making sure they cover all the angles as they enter new territory.
The game begins with the same Mout training course employed by American soldiers, which teaches you the value of cover, how to lay down suppressing fire, and the central tactic of US infantry: that you use one team to keep the enemy busy, while the other flanks and kills them.
The game is set in the fictitious and distinctly Middle Eastern Zekistan, where American and UN teams are constantly under threat from the local "Zekes". Missions vary from firefights in which you move through a level, clearing out adversaries (or "Tangos" as your marines insist on calling them), to extracting wounded troopers and taking a specialist to defuse a batch of surface-to-air missiles you discover.
Each encounter with the enemy is different. Using impressive levels of AI, locals will run to the aid of friends, take to their heels if they notice they're being flanked, and go out of their way to fill your teams with hot lead. Dealing with this means making full use of scenery - a wall or pile of sandbags provide longer-term cover than a car or market stall.
Looking thoroughly realistic, the dedicated professional soldiers also bitch about the heat, make gung-ho comments and swear like the troopers they are. This adds to an atmosphere replete with details such as smoke grenades that are blown around by the wind and final cries of despair as an adversary notices the fragment grenade at their feet a crucial few seconds too late.
Superbly polished, challenging and featuring a highly playable cooperative two-player mode, Full Spectrum Warrior is one of the games of the year and a treat for those who demand more than big explosions.
