But waitaminute, something’s missing – what about grenades or the other cool stuff you’ve heard about? No problem! Finding a creative way to deal with a shortage of buttons versus functions in Full Spectrum Warrior, the development team put in some extra bindings. Holding down certain buttons will yield extra functionality – pushing X for a bit longer will pop up the grenade cursor (with the D-Pad flipping over to select different grenades). Tapping X, and then holding down A will not issue the standard “shoot over here” command, but instead issue a direct “suppression fire” order, which basically means that your men will, barring brief pauses for reloads, throw absolutely every bullet they have in their pockets in the direction you designate – a useful command for when you need to force an enemy down and keep him there, right now. Finally, holding down the A button after issuing a regular move command will issue a “Bounding Overwatch” command. This is the only time a specific squad will split up, specifically into a two-by-two formation. Two soldiers will hang back and provide cover, while the remaining two will advance to your designated waypoint with their weapons up, scanning in the direction the player indicates via targeting circle before the order is given – insanely handy when trying to move a single team from Point A to Point B under heavy enemy fire without getting cut to ribbons while out in the open, or when advancing into unknown territory. Oh, and something to remember is that each team (Alpha and Bravo) are all totally linked together, so issuing an order will pass the command to everyone in that specific team – no splitting Alpha and Bravo into four different squads of two-man teams each. While specific soldiers in a group can be set up to cover their own little fire zone independent of the rest of the squad, that’s the extent of it.

Scattered throughout each mission are “CASEVAC” points, which are used when a wounded soldier needs to be brought back up to health. This is a brief point where the extreme realism promoted in Full Spectrum Warrior passes over, as any wounded soldier brought here will instantly be nursed back to full health. Of course, suffering an injury still has drawbacks. In the middle of a field, if a soldier takes one in the face and goes down, the player has a time limit to get to the downed man and stabilize him before he dies. Popping the movement cursor over the soldier and hitting A will cause the squad to surround the fallen man in covering positions, while the least important member of the team attempts to pick up the wounded soldier. Once he’s secure, your squad is then effectively down two men – the injured guy, plus the man carrying him. On top of that, the entire group moves slower, which can be fatal when trying to spring from cover to cover under tight circumstances. In any case, bringing wounded men back to the aforementioned CASEVAC zones will cause a nearby medic to revive him (this will always happen – a wounded soldier will never die, even if he takes an RPG to the face), and the current squad will also go in for an ammo reload. While unrealistic, this gameplay tweak again makes for more interesting combat, as it causes players to try and generate totally new strategies to try and rescue a wounded man. That smoke grenade might just save someone’s life, so be sure to save a couple. Oh, one other thing on the subject – the U.S. forces apparently have a “zero tolerance” policy on casualties, meaning that if you let a wounded man die, it’s game over, and if two of your men are wounded, it will also be a game over.

With the above stated, the game’s design can sometimes get incredibly frustrating thanks to the fact that squad members will follow each other single-file towards a waypoint, and a single entrenched man can lay waste to an entire team before you even have a chance to respond. Obviously the entire reason behind things like the “Bounding Overwatch” command are to force players to watch their angles carefully as they move out into open areas to avoid being jumped, but I sometimes wish my men would think for themselves a little better. Yes, the squad AI overall is awesome at following my commands and not getting stuck on objects (some great pathfinding is definitely at work here), but I still saw bouts of idiocy. Sometimes I encountered a situation where my squad was caught wide out in the open against a single dumbass terrorist who ran out into the middle of the street and stood there, no cover in sight, taking pot-shots at my men. Pissed at this, I would issue a point fire order to try and take him down, but all my men would do is aim their weapons at him, yell out a daring “HOOYEAH!”, and then… do nothing. Two of my men would then get cut down by stray bullets, and I’d have to revert to the last checkpoint (identified as “SITREPs”, or “Situation Reports” in the game) to try again. Other times I would try to get my M203 gunner to launch an explosive charge of death at an entrenched enemy, only to have him run out into the open, line up his grenade launcher, and just stand there like an idiot doing nothing, even if I repeatedly re-issue the M203 order. Eventually I’m forced to get him back behind cover because he’s standing so far out that he ends up vulnerable to attack. This does not happen very often, but the times it does are incredibly annoying, and I’m often left yelling “SHOOT HIM YOU IDIOTS OH GOD” at my controller when an enemy terrorist runs out into the open with no other enemies in sight. Geesus.

Full Spectrum Warrior’s campaign encompasses 11 missions, which is something to be taken with a mixed opinion. On one hand, the missions end up being so long that they end up taking up an hour or more to actually finish, on average. But unfortunately, 11 missions still makes for far too short of a campaign, and the end arrives all too quickly with a meager final movie that ultimately left me unsatisfied. But was the gameplay experience worthwhile and enticing? Was I tempted to go back and play the game again with different settings? Given the secondary, reportedly much harder difficulty level available, as well as a secret unlockable “Army Mode” (the game was originally a hardcore training sim designed purely for Army forces), I can definitely answer in the affirmative. Despite the action in the game coming off a little repetitive (it all comes down to trying to flank enemy positions over and over again), the game itself feels so well designed and so immersive that I hardly noticed until it was all over.

But there’s even more to bolster this game’s replay value – Xbox Live support is included, which not only opens the door for downloadable content (which the team apparently intends to provide in the near future), but also gives the player a new avenue of play, co-op mode! One of my favorite gameplay types of all time has made it into Full Spectrum Warrior, allowing two players to individually control Alpha and Bravo squads respectively to work through the singleplayer campaign together. Everything’s intact, including the storyline and cutscenes, allowing for a great teamplay experience that drag on into the night with cries of “just one more mission”. Another part of the XBL experience is the ability to trade replays with one another (which can be played back, and allow the player to jump into the action at any time as if they were playing normally), but this is unfortunately the least exciting due to the somewhat linear manner in which mission design has been approached. After running through the game a couple of times, the concept of watching other people do the same parts in a similar manner loses some of its appeal. Unfortunately, there is no player-vs-player mode included, though I hear word that this is planned for the PC version of the game due out in September, along with possible editing tools. In any case, the network code over Xbox Live held up absolutely superbly, and I was astonished at how smooth, seamless, and perfectly synchronized the entire experience was, regardless of if it was normal gameplay or a cutscene. One annoying caveat – co-op play is an Xbox Live feature only and is not available over System Link, a big “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” decision that really had me scratching my head. Since the game’s network mode runs so beautifully over Xbox Live, is there any reason why the multiplayer code couldn’t have been copied over and modified slightly for LAN play?

The graphics engine in Full Spectrum Warrior is another shining aspect to this game, with some amazing animations and an excellent attention to detail. Everything from the uniforms on the soldiers to the weapons they wield are represented beautifully, and the environments look solid and realistic. I think if I had any complaints, it would be with the vehicles; while the player does not ever actually encounter anything he can order his squad to drive, there are a number of NPC vehicles (both friendly and enemy) that are destroyed throughout the game. The effect of this unfortunately looks jarring, as the sudden switch a vehicle suffers from an intact to a destroyed state looks incredibly noticeable and not at all realistic – there’s just simply a fully intact APC one second, and a very different, destroyed hulk of one the next. A more gradual kind of destruction, possibly involving the game’s Havok physics integration would have looked much better, though I’m guessing the development team ran out of time on this.

Ah, yes, physics. As is rapidly becoming the industry standard, Full Spectrum Warrior has a fully integrated physics system, using the widely-accepted codebase from Havok. Probably one of the best objects to show this off is the “abandoned vehicle” cover object, which will slowly fall apart as bullets bounce off it. Everything from the doors swinging open or breaking off, to the windows shattering or pieces of the car even snapping off can occur, and this will actually reflect on the soldiers themselves who may be forced to seek better ground as their cover deteriorates. Physics handling also means that the game stocks a nice ragdoll system for corpse handling, though I think the developers accidentally forgot to change the settings back from “hilarious” to “realistic” before shipping off a gold master. Several times, a sniper on a rooftop will shoot one of my men in the back of the legs, causing him to wildly smash against a nearby wall, bounce off, and zoom straight up into the air in a head-over-heels manner with such force that he ends up landing several feet away, and I was forced to spend several frantic seconds hunting for his body before he died and I failed the mission. Okay, funny is funny, but leave that kind of stuff to Painkiller or the upcoming Serious Sam 2; this is supposed to be a war damnit!

Oh boy, do I love the audio part of FSW. Each soldier at the player’s command has something to say about just about any situation (in a very cursive manner, no less – this game is not for those whose ears burn all too easily), and the entire feel of being in a war is very direct and incredibly immersive. Weapon sounds are some of the best I’ve ever heard in a game, with high-powered explosive weapons offering detonations that can nearly deafen at higher volume levels – players with decent subwoofers will find that the game takes full advantage of their sound setup to annoy family and neighbors alike by causing them to think a full war is brewing in their basement. And to top it all off, the game has a nice overlaying music track that ranges from hardened military themes to some softer tunes more appropriate for the environment that occasionally made me feel like my team was starring in Black Hawk Down. Definitely great stuff.

Full Spectrum Warrior delivers on the promise of offering a modern day tactical game that is totally different from the average title, yet is incredibly easy to pick up and play. My grievances focus around the slightly linear mission design, occasionally idiotic AI (both enemy and friendly, though more so the former), and a short campaign, but everything else the game offers left me with an excellent experience that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I’m proud to count this game among my somewhat limited Xbox collection. This is a game that any kind of shooter fan will most likely find some kind of enjoyment out of, be it the random crazy Counter-Strike shooter fan, to the hardcore Ghost Recon enthusiast. Well worth the purchase, even with the limited campaign, thanks to the future possibilities the cheat code system and Xbox Live support introduce – here’s hoping for more content in the future.