Vietcong showed us the dirty (and downright tough) side of the Vietnam War without the actual death and bad stuff. This time it returns with the focus being on hectic street-to-street fighting rather than crawling through the mud on your belly, but it’s just as dangerous…
Vietcong 2 sets you in the city of Hue in South Vietnam, one of the areas hardest hit by the surprise Tet (Vietnamese New Year) offensive mounted by the Vietcong in January 1968. You’re at a party kicking back with some wine when everything kicks off. RPGs slam into walls taking huge chunks with them and all you can hear is AK-47s going off everywhere. VC2 again captures the atmosphere of violence, fear and confusion in war really well as everything feels very real and no street or alleyway feels safe to hide in.
This is down mostly to the great combination of sound and graphics. There’s always gunfire, rockets whooshing past your ears and soldiers shouting. The graphics are certainly not that pretty but the wrecked city streets do look uninviting with car wrecks and rubble everywhere. This makes actually seeing who’s shooting at you just as impossible as in the dense jungle of the first game and creates an unnerving sense of paranoia that every bit of debris could be housing the soldier that kills you. And you will be killed. A lot.
Being a very realistic game (which has over FIFTY accurately modelled weapons from the Vietnam conflict) diving in gung-ho is not the name of the game here - choose that tactic and you’ll find yourself face-down in the dirt pretty quickly. You’ll need to use a lot of caution and tact when moving around the streets of VC2. The lean buttons and gun sight control is great and helps you get around corners and crossroads without being chewed up, but one thing I really don’t like is the placement of the 'action' button, which is mapped to ENTER, completely away from all the other buttons. This means to open a door you’ve got to stand in front of it and either take your hand off either the mouse or movement keys to open it. Surprisingly you need to be handy with both of those especially when storming rooms! This also becomes a problem when trying to get your medic to heal you in the middle of a firefight or trying to pick up a cool VC gun quickly; you can remap the 'action' button, but there's not much else you can map it to because you use pretty much all the other prominent keys around, but as it stands it’s just too fiddly and spoils an otherwise tidy control system.
In VC2 you get the now factory-standard squad of soldiers to help you out. You get a medic who can heal you if you don’t have any first aid kits handy and a gunner who can replenish your ammo when you need it. This makes the game a little less frustrating since the save points are quite far apart on the levels and it’s annoying to start over again. You can order the soldiers around a bit, like a stripped-down version of the Brothers in Arms system, but they seem to have split personality disorder. One minute they’re Arnie-like soldiers, rushing into houses and clearing the rooms before you even get there, the next they’re like a bunch of lobotomised monkeys, bouncing off each other into bullets and getting stuck in walls and doorways. The latter happens quite frequently in the confined spaces and most of the time they either block you from the objective or box you into a corner. Since you aren’t allowed to kill them (no matter how much you may want to kill that smarmy Aussie medic…) the only option left is to restart the mission and go through it again. War is hell.
And it’s not just your team mates that get stuck on scenery; watching my character make a spiritual and physically-binding union with a wall or table has left me wondering what side this game is on. Bad collision detection is not by a long shot the only glitch or bug in VC2; I’ve had Vietcong appear out of nowhere, levitate and thrown grenades myself only to hit an invisible wall and (the best one) spent the best part of a minute shooting at a hat (yes, just a hat) floating about a courtyard!
Then there’s the graphics - they’re pretty bog-standard for the quality that is currently being churned out but when you come up to two or more soldiers and shoot the frame rate drops faster than Jordan’s pants at the sound of a headline. Usually one game has either good graphics and a bit of slowdown, or vice-versa but when you have both bad points and no good points you know something’s not right.
The online game is pretty solid. Pretty much all of the maps I played got back to the good old jungle where the dense foliage (the “bloody hell, where am I?” kind of dense) and no radar makes for some butt-clenchingly tense games. The promotion system is also pretty good too - for everything you do from kills to capturing flags you are awarded points. When you have enough points you are promoted and get access to different soldier types (gunner, radio operator, commando etc) which also unlocks different weapons.
Vietcong 2 is an engrossing experience that can really get your adrenaline pumping, and is the only game I’ve played that could possibly make me so nervous I’d pee myself a little. It’s just sad that a game with such potential is let down by frame rate problems and a shopping list of bugs and glitches.
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