Now four games old, the Conflict series has built up a faithful following with its unique squad-based tactical and run & gun gameplay mixture. Previously set in the 90s desert wars and then in Vietnam last year, this time out the guys are going global, and seem to have been playing Rainbow Six on their days off…

So what does this mean for us lot? – Well you get delivered by chopper into a world of shite again, and this time all of you manage to get captured (it’s not the first time squad members have been captured). Obviously you quickly escape and then release and re-arm your mates. You then control one character and the squad of three in the same way as before, switching between them at will (with a tap of the D-Pad) or issuing orders with the same ease from a quick menu via the left trigger – it’s top stuff this control system, and easy and intuitive to use whether you’re a Conflict veteran or a newbie (there’s a tutorial too). You also can now issue ‘delayed orders’ in a similar way to Rainbow Six, although it has to be said that we found the use of this feature practically redundant due to the hectic gameplay. The path finding abilities of your squad are as impressive as ever as they do as go where they’re told (just about anywhere in a line of sight), kill enemies (as long as you’ve instructed them to ‘fire at will’) and find their way back to you from long distances through some pretty complex maps.

On the good side, ordering the three other guys around or switching between them soon becomes second nature, and you soon learn each of the squad’s strengths and weaknesses. You can order squad members heal another downed soldier or pick up health packs, weapons & ammo. This clever system also allows you decide which way they’ll face, or make the whole team follow you, fire at will, or hit the ground when the shrapnel starts flying. Although it can sometimes get a bit fiddly purely due to the number of possible actions and options, with practice the control interface works well, and on-screen prompts let you know what the guys can do with context-sensitive commands (like: pick up weapons/ammo or open a door). One gripe I have here is that sometimes you’ll want to pick up a certain weapon and it’ll seem to be “overlapped” by another placed or dropped close by, and manoeuvring into the precise position to pick up or swap weapons can be annoyingly fussy.

Ironically, this constant feeling of being in peril is never more apparent than on the odd occasions on which the squad gets to ride rather than walk; you’ll get to drive vehicles a few times during the campaign, but you never feel safe for a second in them as RPG-toting enemies lie in wait round most corners. One RPG hit will take out a Land Rover, so the guy on the machine gun had better be on his toes. It always seems safer to scout ahead and clear the route so the vehicles have a safer passage – and it’s at this point that you wonder why they bothered with vehicles at all – the enjoyable, open levels of the first Conflict game and the awesome power of the Bradley fighting vehicle’s weapons seem to have been long forgotten.

As with Conflict Vietnam, some battles feel more like the Alamo than anything else (or maybe Custer’s Last Stand), where survival is the only aim. Far detached from Desert Storm, where you felt like the good guys on a crusade/boys day out with lots of neat weapons to play with, here CGS gets to be a real struggle for survival as you kill dozens and dozens of enemies per mission. There seem to be just to many to be believable on most levels, and during one particular “save the VIP” escort type mission (in which CGS gets very close to actually becoming Rainbow Six) you seem to have to kill every terrorist on the planet (and their mates) in order to clear the level. ‘Lots of bad guys to kill can only be a good thing’ I hear you say, but far from adding to the gameplay, too many missions follow the same old course; you enter a building/area, trigger a load of enemies and hunker down and pick them off as they seem to come from all over to join the fight. At the higher difficulty settings in particular, any other course of action is suicidal as the enemies seem so abundant and accurate, and your guys often seem incapable of defending themselves no matter how carefully you set them up.