Full Spectrum Warrior
Chess meets modern-day military combat in an almost-perfect mix of strategy and action.
Published: April 11, 2005
By now, you've probably heard all the hoopla surrounding Full Spectrum Warrior and its humble beginnings as a U.S. Army training tool before finally getting picked up and tweaked for Xbox gamers by THQ and Pandemic Studios about a year ago. Lest you think this is another modern combat SOCOM-style clone, thing again. This is a dumbed-down chess game, but one that looks and sounds amazing - or at least did on the Xbox (and later PC).
The PS2 version, though has suffered some pretty hard knocks in the transition to Sony's little black cinder block. For starters, the legs have been kicked out from under the original game's main draw: the graphics, leaving a competent but simplistic strategy game that can't reach back into it's bag of visual tricks when the simplistic gameplay gets stretched a little too thin. The result is a game that plays well for the most part, but doesn't quite have the punch that the preceding versions had.
Let's start at the beginning, though. FSW tosses you two squads of four military specialists, each equipped with a rifleman, a grenadier, heavy gunner and team leader, each with a bit more combat experience as they go up the chain. The Rifleman is green, but he can rescue downed friends and is hardly a bad shot. The Grenadier can fire, you guessed it, from his grenade launcher to take out hardened targets that would normally provide cover fire and couldn't be reached with a normal lob of the grenade. The Heavy Gunner is equipped with a SAW (think the big ass Gatling gun from the movie Preditor) that does a fantastic job of suppressing enemies. The Team Leader is able to radio in for recon sweeps from overhead choppers and relays situation reports to HQ.
These four men, when used like chess pieces can handle nearly any situation without too much trouble, and when two squads are used in tandem for covering fire or scouting, the game quickly becomes a set series of familiar situations; flanking, suppressive fire, breaching and clearing, and hostage rescue. That's a good thing, as, much like chess, each action has distinct advantages and disadvantages that mean constant attention to position, cover and travel routes becomes an almost move-by-move thinking man's game.
Indeed you'll never get the chance to manually take aim and attack enemies, but then that's not really the goal of the game. Instead, things should be taken more from the perspective of using constant teamwork and each soldier's abilities in any given situation. This is performed by using an simple but intuitive control scheme that allows you to paint your next move with a cursor that displays the eventual formation of your squad when they reach a destination, be it with the TL looking around a corner, everyone grouped for cover behind something small, like a dumpster, or car, or in a worst-case scenario, out in the open.
As you move from position to position, you have the option to train your soldiers' sights in a certain direction, moving two-by-two to intercept any incoming fire that would normally off a good guy in no time. While covered, you can issue an order to fire on an enemy (even if they're protected by cover) or have your squad step out of cover to lay down a steady stream of suppression fire to allow your other squad to move to cover without getting hit. Hitting the circle button will cancel an order and holding it will allow your soldiers to take cover, even breaking formation to do so.
The whole press-or-hold mechanism is used for almost all the moves in the game, allowing for a passive or aggressive strategy depending on the situation. Those situations are really nothing more than a set of basic situations that have a pretty obvious solution most of the time, but part of the challenge can be determining the best way to tackle each situation, since there are indeed multiple ways to untangle a stalemate.
The PS2 version, though has suffered some pretty hard knocks in the transition to Sony's little black cinder block. For starters, the legs have been kicked out from under the original game's main draw: the graphics, leaving a competent but simplistic strategy game that can't reach back into it's bag of visual tricks when the simplistic gameplay gets stretched a little too thin. The result is a game that plays well for the most part, but doesn't quite have the punch that the preceding versions had.
Let's start at the beginning, though. FSW tosses you two squads of four military specialists, each equipped with a rifleman, a grenadier, heavy gunner and team leader, each with a bit more combat experience as they go up the chain. The Rifleman is green, but he can rescue downed friends and is hardly a bad shot. The Grenadier can fire, you guessed it, from his grenade launcher to take out hardened targets that would normally provide cover fire and couldn't be reached with a normal lob of the grenade. The Heavy Gunner is equipped with a SAW (think the big ass Gatling gun from the movie Preditor) that does a fantastic job of suppressing enemies. The Team Leader is able to radio in for recon sweeps from overhead choppers and relays situation reports to HQ.
These four men, when used like chess pieces can handle nearly any situation without too much trouble, and when two squads are used in tandem for covering fire or scouting, the game quickly becomes a set series of familiar situations; flanking, suppressive fire, breaching and clearing, and hostage rescue. That's a good thing, as, much like chess, each action has distinct advantages and disadvantages that mean constant attention to position, cover and travel routes becomes an almost move-by-move thinking man's game.
Indeed you'll never get the chance to manually take aim and attack enemies, but then that's not really the goal of the game. Instead, things should be taken more from the perspective of using constant teamwork and each soldier's abilities in any given situation. This is performed by using an simple but intuitive control scheme that allows you to paint your next move with a cursor that displays the eventual formation of your squad when they reach a destination, be it with the TL looking around a corner, everyone grouped for cover behind something small, like a dumpster, or car, or in a worst-case scenario, out in the open.
As you move from position to position, you have the option to train your soldiers' sights in a certain direction, moving two-by-two to intercept any incoming fire that would normally off a good guy in no time. While covered, you can issue an order to fire on an enemy (even if they're protected by cover) or have your squad step out of cover to lay down a steady stream of suppression fire to allow your other squad to move to cover without getting hit. Hitting the circle button will cancel an order and holding it will allow your soldiers to take cover, even breaking formation to do so.
The whole press-or-hold mechanism is used for almost all the moves in the game, allowing for a passive or aggressive strategy depending on the situation. Those situations are really nothing more than a set of basic situations that have a pretty obvious solution most of the time, but part of the challenge can be determining the best way to tackle each situation, since there are indeed multiple ways to untangle a stalemate.
