Full Spectrum Warrior was a game that, surprisingly, tended to confound many gamers. At least, this is what I garner from the common questions directed towards myself or the message boards I frequent inquiring “what kind of game is this?” Neither a first or third-person shooter, Full Spectrum Warrior was a game of strategy and tactics. As a unique measure, the game was focused on a kind of “indirect” control scheme – players could issue move orders, specify fire zones, and even set up the launching of grenades or heavy artillery, but all of this was done from an objective point of view, and it was up to the AI to actually process and complete these tasks effectively. Because of the game’s focus on military realism, the player’s success would be gauged on his ability to effectively manage his two fire teams and to ensure they had adequate cover during a firefight.

Sadly, this kind of gameplay was so focused on squad management that it neglected some key ingredients required to make the action fun. Primarily, the game over-emphasized a little too much on scripted events, making the maps almost completely linear in nature. AI units would also sit behind a single piece of cover for an eternity if needed, occasionally firing pot-shots back at the player until the scripting called for him to move or the player found a way to out-flank the enemy’s cover. Now granted, a game focused on using realistic military tactics in this kind of context was something I found very cool and novel for it’s time, and warranted at least a couple of play-throughs thanks to the wise inclusion of co-op play. However, the more I played the game the more I realized the inherent flaws contained within, which is why I took a highly skeptical viewpoint when the release of Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers was announced. Has developer Pandemic Studios learned from the complaints and imperfections that existed in the original title? Let’s delve into Ten Hammers and find out.

The scenario presented in Ten Hammers takes place a short time after the evil terrorist leader in Zekistan was brought down by a determined unit of American forces. Unfortunately, the political situation in the area is still highly unstable, giving U.S. and Coalition forces the opportunity to charge in and kick some terrorist ass once more – I mean, “save the day”. To be honest, the first iteration of Full Spectrum Warrior wasn’t exactly blessed with a gripping plot, though the intro movie showing biographies on all of the team members (like the “Leet gamer” with anime tattoos) offered quite a novelty factor. Fortunately, the sequel has made up for this with a much greater level of depth on a “human” level. Several pre-rendered cutscenes are scattered through the campaign, with several of them focused from the perspective of an in-field reporter who follows the exploits of the major characters in the game. Interestingly however, thanks to adjustments in the way the game is paced and balanced, there’s now much less of a focus on individual characters, due to the fact that every controllable soldier in the game has the chance of being replaced if injured and brought to a “CASEVAC” checkpoint during a mission.

But I’m jumping ahead – let’s start off by addressing some of the elements that make me feel Pandemic Studios really paid attention to the feedback received from the original game. Foremost on the list of things I noticed were the interface improvements prevalent in Ten Hammers. For the uninitiated, Full Spectrum Warrior focuses primarily on controlling two or more squads at a time, setting up fire zones and moving up in gradual formations to proceed safely through enemy territory. However, one common complaint was that the interface controls were limited exclusively to the currently selected squad, meaning that in order to move your teams up or issue individual orders, a lot of unnecessary switching-around had to occur, making the process tedious at best, and downright catastrophic at worst (during heavy battle or ambush situations effectively).

Thankfully, Ten Hammers has resolved this complaint through an intuitive and highly dynamic squad control interface, which in itself makes the game much easier and much more interesting to play. At first glance the control scheme is similar to the original – left-click to bring up a cursor for focusing your men into a specific fire-zone, right-click to bring up a move cursor for telling your men where to go. In Ten Hammers, positioning the move cursor is still the same, but if you hold down the right mouse button after selecting a location, you will now get a new screen to tell any of your currently active fire teams to move to that point. The AI is able to path-find remarkably well, even over long distances, so I found that this option alone made for an invaluable asset when trying to rapidly re-group my teams.

This is ultimately nothing however when compared with the new “buddy” system. By pushing the numbers 1 or 2 after positioning the move cursor, each fire team can now pair off into individual “buddy teams” – the Team Lead and Assault Rifleman on team one, and the Grenadier and general Rifleman on team two. This effectively means that players now have many more tactical options available to them even if only a single fire team is deployed to an area, because at any time they can be split up for a variety of tasks. Thanks to all of these improvements, finely-coordinated pincer movements are now a possibility!

But wait, there’s even more. Now each member of the squad actually has a unique and specific use, which is not only interesting, but even mandatory to progress through some parts of the game. By holding down the “E” key with any given man selected, a special action can be triggered. For example, the Assault Rifleman can lay down heavy suppression fire, completely immobilizing enemies within a certain zone from countering – a perfect maneuver for desperate situations. The Grenadier of course has his M203 grenade launcher, and the Rifleman can actually “snipe” enemies who are behind cover. Finally, the Team Lead can even call in for air support via a laser designator on some missions. There’s a downside though – each team member must expose himself in order to use these abilities, drastically increasing the chances of this man getting cut to pieces if deployed inefficiently.

So let’s add all of these factors together – do these improvements make Ten Hammers a better game as a whole? Is this enough to make gamers who outright declared the original Full Spectrum Warrior boring pick up the sequel and enjoy it? Personally, I’m inclined to say that it definitely does. Not only because the improvements make for a much more interesting and dynamic play environment, but also because the AI will also now actually dynamically react to the player’s actions, and will take cover in different areas, change their locations, and in some situations will even initiate tactical maneuvers of their own to try and out-flank the player’s squad by surprise. I was also really impressed with the ability to now dynamically split up squads into sub-groups, which comes with its own share of advantages and risks and serves to make the otherwise linear levels even more interesting. Oh yes, and did I mention the joyous vehicles and functional gun emplacements, which are now actually controllable by the player under certain situations?

Now I will comment on the best part of the equation: the multiplayer. The fact that the game offers co-op play is of course expected after one of the major redeeming features of the original, but its inclusion is no less impressive. I have a complaint however: Unless a mission is unlocked in singleplayer mode first on the player’s currently chosen profile, this mission will never be available in co-op mode – even if you beat the mission with a friend, the game will refuse to give you access to the next level and will simply repeat the same mission endlessly. The fact that this nearly ruined a perfectly good day of LAN gaming is something I was prepared to mutilate the game developers for, until we discovered the intrigue of the game’s versus mode. Here’s an idea: Take the highly intense, dynamic, and strategy-based gameplay seen in singleplayer, then hand control of the terrorists over to one player and set up an objective-based multiplayer scenario. What you get is a very novel and heart-pounding experience, with Coalition / U.S. players working to complete an objective (such as rescuing pilots or destroying an ammo dump) in a co-ordinated manner, while the terrorist team operates in an individual basis, but has access to a very high number of reinforcements, and can even recruit NPCs to fight for their cause throughout the map. To claim this is “cool” would be an understatement, and I really was looking forward to the opportunity to try this out in a larger-scale manner – sadly, my repeated attempts to get involved in an online multiplayer session found no matches.

Let’s close up with a word on sound and graphics. In terms of sound, Ten Hammers puts forth a pretty convincing performance – the voice acting isn’t bad (I even enjoyed the one soldier who sounds suspiciously like Sgt. Johnson from Halo), and the music is generally enjoyable and tense, if slightly repetitive. A complaint I have however is with respect to the weapon noises. While guns like the M249 sound nice and meaty once they let rip, I was actually unimpressed by the firing noises from the standard rifles being used by the other soldiers in the team, and feel they could’ve been beefed up a little to sound a bit more than something resembling a pop-gun. At the very least, Ten Hammers is quite good on the graphics – it’s not exactly the kind of outstanding setup one would expect from, say, Oblivion, but it does the job, and the animations are just as crisp and fluent as they were in the original. Combine this with some fluid framerates, and Ten Hammers puts forth a command performance which does the job nicely.