This review of Full Spectrum Warrior (hereafter referred to simply as Ten Hammers) has been particularly difficult for me to write. There are certain games a person can pick up and play that will immediately impress them, sucking them in with a nifty feature or interesting environment or compelling storytelling, while other games can do the opposite: provoking revulsion and disgust at such a tired and lazy effort, leading almost immediately to total boredom and an acute sense of buyer’s remorse.
Ten Hammers falls into neither category. It is not the “must-play” game of the year, nor this summer’s steaming pile of gaming grog. Ten Hammers is merely… well, competent. Yes, competent is probably the best way to describe it. That statement of course is vexingly vague, and I use it as both a mild compliment and a thinly veiled criticism of Pandemic’s latest offering. Upon initial play Ten Hammers entirely failed to wow me, but it didn’t make me feel like I should immediately go in search of something better.
The main trouble with competent games is that’s usually all you can say about them, but let’s see if I can stretch that description over a couple more paragraphs. I have never played the original game properly, nor the U.S. Army training tool it was developed alongside, so I will try and restrict myself first to judging Ten Hammers as something of a standalone game. On that basis, it is relatively good. In practice the game plays out like the Pentagon’s wet dream for the Iraq war – U.S. led “coalition” forces go into save obscure Middle Eastern country, U.S. troops kill all the bad guys, save the civilians and come out battered but heroically triumphant.
Your job is to command two four-man U.S. fireteams as they carry out their missions. These teams, Alpha and Bravo, can be further split into “buddy teams” of two men apiece, allowing you in an engagement to spread your men into multiple positions to give yourself maximum tactical advantage. That is, if you can ever get a handle on the controls. I have never encountered any system like it on the Xbox, and it will take you quite a bit of practice to use the thing properly. Switching between anywhere up to four teams and any accompanying armour support in the middle of a gun battle can be maddeningly confusing at times, but perseverance is the key here. As it stands I was impressed by the way the developers managed to map so many different controls and options onto the Xbox controller, but the system is occasionally a tad illogical. For example, there are sections when the likes of Bradley AFV’s are available as support for your men (a new feature for Ten Hammers), and they follow controls in almost the same way as a regular squad, yet they must be selected separately from a vague radar screen and not through the use of a toggle as with normal squads.
The camera can cause no end of confusion in certain situations and tight spots. Your view is limited to a third-person perspective of whatever team you have selected, and you have no ability to zoom or look ahead properly. The camera takes it sweet time toggling between squads and also automatically snaps around to face in the direction the team leader is looking, meaning you can end up having to constantly force it where you want it to go. This being an Xbox game the graphics (accomplished as they are) are starting to show their age alongside the likes of the PC and Xbox 360.
Firefights are pleasing enough when engaging the enemy at a distance, but get your men up close and Ten Hammers’ glaring problems are revealed in all their perplexing glory. Take this instance; I was trying to flank a pair of enemies who had hunkered down behind some crates. My team leader, who had just moments previously sniped another foe in the head from five hundred yards, brought his team around behind the shooters, and opened fire on them at no less than ten feet. The enemy, caught on the turn and at point blank range, did not collapse under the hail of lead as you might expect, but spun and managed to mow down two of my men and escape. And my troops were in cover. That situation sums up quite neatly the main problem in Ten Hammers’ combat – there’s an element of randomness that completely confounds everything you might think you’ve prepared for tactically. My troops are highly trained killing machines; they are supposed to be accurate all of the time. These kinds of men do not miss at point blank range. Nor do supposedly solid concrete walls occasionally become less than bullet proof. Ten Hammers is the kind of game that will still punish you for playing by the rules.
Combat balance issues and inconsistencies in the controls and the camera would not be such big problems if this happened to be Pandemic’s first time out with this title. But Ten Hammers is a sequel, and it’s still carrying around these faults that the original game was criticized for. That makes them all the less excusable, and prevents it achieving anything more than a slightly above average score. One for the fans, or the extremely curious.
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