Gunnery by numbers

While it can be a bit too much like a training exercise, Full Spectrum Warrior is still a unique and fun game.

By Bruce Buckman / Tuesday, January 25 2005

Full Spectrum Warrior offers a fairly unique style of game play in which you control two squads of soldiers but never get to fire a weapon. Instead, the game has you moving your men to the right place at the right time and issuing basic fire orders. From there, your team of grunts can do the trigger work themselves.

The game is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country that sounds a lot like Iraq. Combat is exclusively urban, and the initial training missions do a great job of covering everything you need to know. The basic elements at your command are your two squads, each comprising a rifleman, a squad leader, a gunner and a grenadier. The gunner carries the light machine gun, while the grenadier has a grenade launcher mounted on his rifle. And that is as heavy as your weaponry gets, except on those occasions when you get some help from the air or tanks.

You move your teams around by using the mouse to choose a location to move to and a formation to adopt.

The campaign is a tad short; even with the two extra missions, the PC version gets compared to its Xbox cousin. The game originally started life as a training simulation done for the US Army, and this is perhaps its greatest weakness — despite its excellent graphics and the constant chatter of the men in your two four-man squads, the game can at times feel a bit sterile. After a while you’ll begin wishing for a touch of first-person shooter chaos, rather than the methodical approach the game demands. The game really boils down to flushing the enemy out, as they don’t come rushing at you Black Hawk Down style. That said, the game handles its mechanics well, looks good and is fun to play.

FULL SPECTRUM WARRIOR
PROS:
Unique game play style; good visuals and smooth control.

CONS:
The methodical approach needs to be enlivened with a touch more chaos.

7.5