So you've battled through MOHAA and Spearhead, and Pacific Assault isn't gonna arrive until next January? Then give Vietcong a try. It's a mean game even on "normal" with mostly good AI, and enough wicked traps and cunningly concealed snipers to keep you running back to the last unfortunate sod you dispatched to check his corpse for a medipack. Amazingly, he and his equipment will still be there! Including his weapon(s) and ammo! They do not mysteriously dissolve through the floor as happens in so many other games. Just as well, as your carrying capacity is realistically(?) limited to one handgun and one rifle or machine-gun. You will need to acquire some VC weaponry when your own ammo runs out. The authentic 60's issue weaponry feels and handles well, and the sound effects are excellent, from the weapon samples to ambient animal sounds, and the nasty sneering cackles and whoops of the VC when they kill you (and they will kill you, often, believe me). You even suffer temporary deafness from nearby explosions (or is that a glitch?)

   

Getting killed brings me to my first criticism of course: you can't save during missions, and they can be rather long and/or difficult. Vietcong is more linear and defined than, for instance, Project IGI that also had this failing; so repeating your attempts through the more treacherous parts can become irksome. It is also hard (and obviously meant to be, to demonstrate just how bad it was out there for the G.I.s) - you take a realistic level of damage when hit, although you regain an unrealistic health recovery on using a medipack if you have one, or can find one (did Ho-Chi-Minh really issue them to the VC?). In some missions you also have the advantage of a medic who you can summon or crawl to for help, also a point man, demolitions man, weapons specialist and radioman. This team of multi-talented GI's (you sometimes find yourself loosely in charge of) can be extremely useful; your Vietnamese point man guiding and helping you avoid traps, etc. However, it can be annoying to find that they've followed you into a dead-end and won't get out of the way, trapping you on the spot; the only way out seems to be to restart - at the beginning of the level of course, as you can't save anywhere else. Another problem is the frame-rate, which drops in moments of intense action, but I suppose we are all bound to have got used to that, and it hasn't stopped me enjoying the game (this review was done on a 1.2gig Athlon with a Radeon 9000 accelerator and it seems that the best in-game graphics will always push the card you have beyond its capabilities).

   

VC has to be commended for the effort made in reproducing natural, wild, jungle with actual 3D plants - not 2D sprites that turn to face you, as form most of the undergrowth in Soldier of Fortune 2. This provides you with a lot of cover: shrubs to crawl through hopefully unseen, and rocks, outcrops, tree-trunks and bamboo stalks to hide behind, quite apart from the man-made structures. Some nice touches include fluttering butterflies, and parrots that you may disturb, giving away your position (arggghhhh!). OK, so Vietcong isn't perfect, but it is pretty damn good effort at a difficult scenario and for me, at least, it kicks SOF2's ass all the way down the Mekong.