After experiencing the purely average quality of ShellShock: Nam ’67, I was hoping for a lot more out of the second Vietnam title I had gotten my hands on, Conflict: Vietnam. Promising squad-based action, an actual storyline, varied and interesting mission objectives, and even some manner of quasi-RPG system to boot, I figured this game would actually make me dance for joy every time I went to boot it up again for some more action. Of course, that was before I realized I was living in some crazy dream world where games actually stand up to expectations and end up, somehow, not sucking. Really, one of these days I’m just going to adopt a “game sucks until proven innocent” attitude towards the industry so I’ll quit being disappointed so god damn much.

Conflict: Vietnam had a promising takeoff at least, and the first impressions of mine were actually somewhat favorable. Following installation and initial setup, the game launches and offers an intro, narrated by one of the main characters, Pvt. Harold Kahler. Harold was just a normal, boring kind of guy before getting drafted for Vietnam as a field medic, and has now been called into action as part of a four-man team to go kick some Victor-Charlie ass. The intro movie reveals a little of his background and introduces him to some of the people he’ll be working with as he’s flown in by chopper to the local base, then the game puts me in the driver’s seat for a few orientation lessons. Unlike ShellShock, you don’t actually end up heading back to base between each and every mission, and apparently this gave the map designers an excuse to crank out a lot more detail. The base the player is introduced to in Conflict: Vietnam is surprisingly large and split up into several areas, with lots of NPCs to annoy, conversations to interrupt, and even some little sub-quests to do. Immediately upon arrival, I was summoned on the base intercom (which was of course blaring the standard-fare 60’s music and random war-related commentary) to the local armory to check in and get my standard medic gear, followed by a new objective that had me being ushered over to the local medical clinic to grab some supplies (I was, after all, a field medic). During that time, the medic in charge was busy trying to heal a wounded soldier, who suddenly started dying. As he yelled at my face for me to grab a medical kit and help out, I quickly fumbled around the room like a buffoon, found the object I was supposed to grab, picked it up, and ran back to save the wounded soldier before he began spraying blood all over the room. Somehow, I actually managed to stabilize the soldier (a total miracle, given how I was still trying to get used to my role as a man of healing rather than my preferred duty as a harbinger of chaos and misery), and was rewarded appropriately. Neat.

The first “mission” inside of the base is full of these little “bonus objectives” that can be found and completed, as are the rest of the missions throughout the game, which can range from ensuring the survival of innocent villagers to trying to find the dog tags of killed soldiers, with the ultimate reward being some extra points that are handed off once the mission is over. I’ll delve into why in a bit, but it’s sufficient to say that by this point, I was pretty engrossed in the game. Okay, the character models looked a little corny, and the voice acting wasn’t all that great, but dammit, at least they were trying. So then, I reached a point where I was introduced properly to the rest of my team and given a basic orientation on how to control them. Each of the four members (a leader, a sniper, a heavy gunner, and the medic we already know about) can be switched to at any time for direct control, or they can be issued remote context-specific commands by holding down the right mouse button, hitting F1-F4 to select a specific squad member, popping the cursor over something, and hitting the left mouse button. It seemed simple enough at first, but unfortunately the VC forces then decided to attack the base, and everything went horribly, horribly wrong. Up to this point, I had been having some minor difficulties trying to get accustomed to the game’s control system and ended up escaping back into the key bind dialogue every five minutes so I could re-bind several buttons for better handling, but once I was actually introduced to the demands of real combat, everything fell apart.

See, my greatest beef with Conflict: Vietnam is the control system. The game feels incredibly clunky to play, and while “overly complicated” isn’t a phrase I feel justified in using very often (not while I have a Steel Battalion controller staring at me on my desk), it sadly very much applies to this situation. Moving around and shooting is pretty simple, but actually playing the game effectively takes a lot more effort. The game can be played from a first or third person camera, but you’ll find yourself spending 99% of the time in third person mode because of the “iron sights” model that blocks over half your screen in first person view. This is nice for accurate aiming (and there’s another button to zoom your view in slightly for a more accurate shot), but I couldn’t find any way to make the iron sights disappear for a more conventional first person view, meaning I either had to holster my gun, or go back to third person just to see where I was going. The camera for third person makes movement awkward as well, with it floating along in a funny manner every time I strafed, and sometimes angling itself in a poor manner. There are also controls for crouching and going prone, toggling between walking and running, manipulating the environment, and about six different ways to go about fiddling with your inventory. Combine all of this with the fact that you have a squad to take care of, and things get even more hairy. I seriously feel that a lot of streamlining could have been done for the controls to cut down on the amount of frustrating time I spent in the configuration screens trying to find a setup that would finally suit me, and until I had mastered all of the hotkeys and remembered which number key correlated to a given item, inventory management was a huge pain in the ass. The game also refused to properly accept my middle mouse button as valid for some reason – I could bind it properly, but it never did what it was supposed to during gameplay.

Squad control was supposed to be a cool redeeming feature to this game, but instead it just ended up making things worse. Thanks to a fairly poor level of pathfinding, placing my squad exactly where I wanted them was a huge pain in the ass that commonly demanded I switch over to manually reposition the offending member. As I said previously, orders can be issued by holding down the right mouse button (by default) and left clicking on a chunk of terrain or an object to have them perform the relevant action, but trying to pair off my machinegunner and sniper in a close formation to cover each other commonly resulted in them attempting to occupy the same place. Then, when an enemy came around the corner, the machinegunner ended up filling the sniper full of holes in his crazed attempt to kill the bad guys. Unless I specifically set move orders for my team mates a far distance from each other, they would inevitably just home in on the exact same spot, forcing me to constantly fix the problem by hand. There are also numerous annoying gaps in terms of what you can and can’t do with your squad – I kept wanting to make individual members of my team get into an exacting position and go prone remotely, but couldn’t find a way to do this without making my entire team go prone at once. There’s no way to make an AI team mate use a specific weapon, or even not use a specific weapon, which ties into another beef I have involving the game’s inventory management. Each member of your squad has his own complete inventory, with limited ammunition and items, but not only is there absolutely no way to remotely discern when a team mate is low on supplies for his preferred weapon (there are no ammo counters for team mates on the HUD, and they never seemed to say anything relevant), but they will also not hesitate to throw everything they have at Charlie, even if it meant chucking all of their grenades and two full clips of machinegun ammo into a mountainside. The squad AI overall felt really poorly done (they commonly blocked my way when I tried to retreat unless I deliberately told them to hold still before-hand, and never ran away from live grenades landing near their feet), and the clunky control system only made things worse.

After dealing with these problems for the early parts of the game, I suddenly realized that I just plain wasn’t having fun. Each time I tried to deploy my men in an efficient manner to deal with a constant incoming threat or even tried to get them to grab a simple medical kit, something inevitably went wrong and I was left frantically trying to clean up the mess. But what really drove the nail in the coffin for me was the save system. At first, I was happy to note that I could actually save any time I wanted to (what a novel concept!), until my eyes skimmed over the “Saves Remaining” field. Yes, Conflict: Vietnam only allows you to manually save a whopping two times per mission. Does this make the game more “immersive” and “intense?” Maybe – until I find myself playing the last twenty minutes of a mission over again because my idiot team mates made a stupid mistake that got me killed, and I had no saves left. One of the worst things a game can personally do to me is make me do tedious crap over and over again, and it is for this reason that I stopped playing about half way through and simply gave up. Sure, I could have hunted down some cheats and forced my way through the entirety of the game in the name of a complete review, but what would have been the point to even playing then? Oh, and did I mention that the game consistently makes use of infinitely respawning enemies? Funny how I didn’t notice that Charlie simply wasn’t going to stop coming until I was almost totally out of ammo. At one point as a test, I stationed my entire team inside of a bunker, had them all face the only exit, set them to “Fire at Will”, and walked away for a couple of minutes. When I came back, a huge stack of corpses was lined up outside of the door, and more Charlie kept pouring into the room. Look, I know Vietnam was about enemy soldiers hitting the Americans hard and fast with seemingly unstoppable, overwhelming numbers, but the fact that almost every encounter resulted in indefinable numbers of reinforcements (some literally jumping down a cliff from off the map over and over again) forced the game’s pacing up several notches higher than I felt comfortable with, especially when I was forced to grapple with such a limited save system.

At least the game engine ranks a little better. By jacking up the (limited) graphical options, I got perfectly playable framerates on my XP2500+/Radeon 9600 Pro rig, with decent load times and no general hiccups. The environments look fleshed out pretty well with textures detailed in a decent manner, and the character models, while still looking a little funny (as mentioned earlier, although the way blood splatters appear depending on where a soldier is hit is pretty cool) are at least animated solidly and have some good lip-syncing. Ragdoll physics are also in and get some heavy use (as is the norm for games these days, how far we’ve come…), as enemy soldiers get knocked from their high perches in wacky and awkward manners, some even getting hung up in trees or other objects as they fall down. The effects of the ragdoll physics are a little more noticeable in Conflict: Vietnam than they were in ShellShock: Nam ’67, but I still enjoyed seeing them in motion. The weather effects (such as rain, rain, and more rain) are pretty nice too… really, I have nothing significant to complain about in regards to the game’s graphical engine, as while it puts out a decent presentation, it also isn’t anything exceptional, and anything nice I noticed was quickly overshadowed once again by the crummy gameplay. I also didn’t care at all for the rate corpses disappeared at as soon as I looked away – let me enjoy the carnage with my gig of RAM, dammit!

The sound engine is more of a love/hate relationship. I dug the cliché musical themes offered, and the voice acting was pretty great as well, but one irritation I constantly ran into was that the dialogue was so god damn quiet, and there’s no option to turn it up or enable subtitles. Because your squad constantly relays their status only in a verbal manner (when they’ve seen an enemy, or a trap, or was offering some kind of other mission-critical wording), I was always straining to hear what the hell my comrades were saying over the surrounding noise of gunfire and mortars exploding everywhere. I don’t know why “voices too damn quiet” never slipped onto the game’s Q&A list – or maybe it did and the sound engineers just weren’t paying attention. Not all of us have superman hearing, christ.

As I’ve already given the gist of in the entirety of this article, Conflict: Vietnam is nothing more than a huge letdown, even more so than that of ShellShock. There are just so many game-ruining problems with the AI, general game design, and other aspects that I found myself tempted to just delete the game out of irritation and chuck the discs out after it forced me to endure such terrible agony with promises of decent gameplay. Even the RPG system isn’t really worth much, as I never noticed any solid difference from sinking points into a given soldier’s specialized abilities (with medical skills being the most useless of all – a “dead” soldier just falls on his ass and is immobile until someone wanders over with a medical kit to “revive” him, and medical kits can also increase hitpoints on a wounded soldier, but they heal so much with only the most basic skillpoints invested that I didn’t see why I should bother increasing the skill level further), and added up with the game’s other faults, ultimately proved useless. Co-op play is the one redeeming feature that might’ve saved this title, and I even found it listed as a valid feature somewhere, but, oddly enough, multiplayer support is totally absent from my PC version of the game. I guess they decided to restrict it to the game’s console-based ports, which is a big shame.

Ultimately, my thoughts on the game should be obvious by now. As far as spending your hard-earned dollar goes, you could do worse, but you could also do a hell of a lot better too, which makes me wonder why anybody would bother splurging on a ruined game like this in the impending face of Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and other behemoths. If you really, really want your Vietnam fix, go buy an antiquated copy of Line of Sight: Vietnam, and invite a bunch of friends over for some hilariously cheesy co-op action. Otherwise, either pocket your money for one of the impending blockbuster titles, or blow it all at 7-11 on some slushie goodness. Either eventuality will ultimately be far more satisfying than trying to experience the difficult, awkward, poorly-designed horror that is Conflict: Vietnam.