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Full Spectrum Warrior (XBOX) has been a game I've been looking forward to playing for months. It was supposed to be one of the most realistic squad-based tactical games created, allowing you to control two fireteams in an urban warfare environment through a variety of missions. The game has generally succeeded, falling short in a few places, but overall creating a highly addictive and immersive environment.

The gameplay in FSW is surprisingly simple once you've acquainted yourself with the controls. Essentially, you have two fireteams - Alpha and Bravo. Each fireteam consists of four men: team leader, autorifleman, rifleman and grenadier. You do not control individual members of the team but instead command each fireteam as a unit, telling them where to move, where to fire, or how to engage a target.

Moving the fireteams is very intuitive. A context-sensitive cursor is used to position the fireteam, and the AI will intelligently handle the rest. According to the position you've selected the fireteam will take cover, take a corner position and check for hostiles, or just move into open territory. Similarly if hostiles are detected, your team leader alerts you, and you can assign a fire zone and tell your men to open fire.

There are two ways to engage a target, either 'point firing' whereby soldiers will shoot at the hostiles while remaining behind cover as much as possible. 'Suppression fire' has every soldier in the fireteam step out of cover and fire continuously. Suppression fire often causes the targets to duck behind cover and stay there (useful for moving your other fireteam), but very quickly depletes ammunition.

This is basically it in terms of control in FSW. The strategy and main part of the game is utilizing both fireteams to successfully engage multiple targets. Furthermore, often hostiles will be dug in or have a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Therefore, the beauty of FSW lies in reacting quickly to the changing environment and safely taking out the hostiles. Each fireteam is equipped with a GPS system, allowing one team to find a flanking position while the other occupies the hostile by firing upon them.

Furthermore, some of the more exciting gun battles can occur when one of your men is shot. You are not allowed to leave a man to die, you must pick him up and get him medical attention. On the most part though, any soldier that is shot is in open territory. Picking up a wounded man for medical attention is also a relatively time-consuming process. Therefore, you have to quickly bring up your other fireteam to suppress any hostiles in the area, while tending to your fallen soldier. In multiple hostile situations, this can be very tense.

Graphics within FSW are generally superb: the meticulous modelling, the fantastic attention to detail in the maps, and the eye candy all make for a highly immersive experience. While the colour map used within the game is relatively monotonous (varying shades of yellow), this can be forgiven since the game is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country, surrounding by deserts.

Special mention must go to the maps, which have been painfully created with a huge amount of peripheral detail. For example, one mission has you rescuing a crew of a J-STARS aircraft (essentially a Boeing 737) that has been shot down. Furthermore, the J-STARS has crashed into a building, carving a groove into it with its wing and collapsing around it. This scenario has been modelled incredibly well, with burnt out portions of the aircraft, crumbling sections of the building, and burning piles of rubble strewn around the map.

Eye candy is also nicely implemented throughout the game. Tracers from weapons and sparks from ricoheting bullets make firefights increasingly tense. Worse still, many types of cover will slowly lose their ability to adequately stop bullets. For example, wooden boxes will start to splinter, or cars will break apart. Even walls you use for cover will start to be chipped by incoming bullets.

The AI within FSW is truly remarkable at times and slightly disappointing at others. The AI of the solders in your fireteams is superb, definitely some of the best I've seen a squad-based game. They will take positions intelligently according to their environment, can find the best cover if they come under fire, move intelligently as a team, and generally exhibit extremely realistic behaviour. The fireteams even act intelligently together. For example, one part of the game saw me laying down a very large amount of suppresive fire from both fireteams, in order to allow a third fireteam to take out the hostiles themselves. I therefore ordered all eight soldiers behind the same cover. The fireteams arrived simultaneously and quickly layered and arranged themselves so that all eight had a clean line-of-sight to the target area. FSW is one of the first games where you could order your squad about and not worry about them doing something stupid. (For more information, see the Generation5 interview with the AI programmer on FSW)

It wasn't all perfect though. I had a definite problem with the enemy cover system, which seemed rather unfairly weighted against the player. Hostiles would often seek cover when they spotted your fireteam, or retreated if you got too close. Unfortunately, enemies seemed to have a very unfair advantage when it came to the amount of cover they received. For example, I had one hostile triangulated by my two fireteams. The hostile was behind a little piece of rubble, and within the game both fireteams had a very clean line-of-sight. It was quite comical to see my eight soldiers firing at a hostile in plain sight, with dust and sparks flying about, but not one bullet actually hitting their target.

I often felt therefore when playing the game that scenarios were contrived to ensure the player flanked the hostile, instead of using the superior fire power and numbers. Indeed, there was never a situation within the game that saw the fireteams outnumbered. I would have liked to have seen the game tweaked to ensure a fairer (easier?) battle against a larger number of enemies. Enemy positions were also fixed, ensuring that hostiles would only ever surprise you once.

This aside, the game has a wonderfully polished feel to it. All sound within the game is fantastic, with a very extensive dialogue library. Players should be warned though that the dialogue is also very realistic. If soldiers are fired upon they don't say, "Aww geez" but more like "Where the f*** did that come from?!". While parents may not agree, the realistic dialogue adds a surprising degree of immersiveness to the game.

Add to this XBOX Live support with downloadable content, a replay feature and an excellent set of training missions, the game feels extremely polished. This polish does have a price though. The game is very short, at about 8 hours of gameplay on standard difficulty, including the training missions. XBOX Live subscribers should get more longevity out of the game, but players without might feel slightly cheated.

Nevertheless, for players that love squad-based games, it doesn't get much better than Full Spectrum Warrior. Highly-addictive and immersive, with some of the best squad AI I've seen in a while, you will have a hard time putting your controller down.

	9.0
	Platform: XBOX Liked: Excellent squad AI, graphics and audio immersive, maps very detailed Disliked: Short, enemy cover system unfair, no replay value for those without XBOX Live .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.