I’ll admit I knew very little about this game up until recently. I’d look up at some screenshots and think “oh, goody, another Rainbow Six 3!” and elect not to research the title further. Of course, then people notified me what a moron I was and educated me on exactly what the hell this game was supposed to be, and now I consider myself an enlightened individual. As soon as Full Spectrum Warrior, the latest squad-based Xbox strategy title from THQ hit store shelves, I ran out and picked it up purely on a random whim. So am I satisfied with my purchase, having crushed the forces of Al Afad and freed Zekistan from those no-good terrorists? In a word, yes…. but no. But yes. Read on to find out what the hell I’m talking about.

First of all, I urge everybody to avoid making the same mistake I did in blowing off the game as “just another tactical shooter” – Full Spectrum Warrior is anything but. The most fascinating aspect of the approach to gameplay is how hands-off it is, without actually causing the game to be boring due to lack of interaction. On the contrary, there’s plenty for the player to do, but the pacing and level of thinking is now totally different. This is due to the fact that, of the eight men under the player’s command (split into two teams – Alpha and Bravo squad, respectively), the player doesn’t ever directly control any of them. He takes on a disembodied state in the action, seeing the battlefield from the bouncy perspective of what almost seems like a wartime journalist. The two squads are totally AI controlled, with the player’s actions simply involving switching between the two groups, issuing movement commands, and directing fire to take down those wacky terrorists. Thanks to an excellent, intuitive interface and easy to grasp gameplay elements, FSW is a game that just about anybody can pick up and enjoy getting their tactical shooter fill.

The game takes place in Zekistan, a foreign city where a terrorist leader (one Mohammad Jabbour Al-Afad) has risen to power and is both suppressing the local populace, as well as lashing out at U.S. and U.K. targets. In response, NATO forces decide it’s time to kick ass and start with an invasion. After a lengthy window of air attacks resulting in the destruction of strategically vital targets, the ground pounders finally roll onto the scene to clean house. “Charlie-90” is the global designation for the team controlled by the player, led by Lt. Phillips, who sits back nice and comfy in a secure zone to bark out orders at random.

Of course, none of this matters to the player initially, as before he can embark on his singleplayer adventure, a series of training missions must be completed. These effectively take about an hour overall to complete, but are incredibly thorough at covering just about everything the player will need to know on how to play. Everything from manipulating the camera to remembering to check your god damn sectors is drilled in an efficient manner, and anything not directly demonstrated during training is covered in a quick post-session review movie, showing off some of the tactics being used in actual battle situations. The quality of the training sessions in Full Spectrum Warrior are unmatched by most modern-day titles, and I felt the game did a kick ass job at making sure I knew exactly what I was doing before being sent into the field.

Booting up the main campaign offers a lengthy pre-rendered intro movie, giving a thorough, occasionally humorous introduction to each critical member of the Charlie-90 team (I like the “leet gamer” guy with all the anime tattoos) as they escort a convoy into Zekistan. While on the final leg of its journey, the convoy is ambushed by those crazy terrorists, forcing everybody to scatter to cover. With an immediate objective to run out and try to evacuate whoever’s left alive after the ambush, control is finally handed over to the player so he can start his own personal war on terror.

Both Alpha and Bravo teams are each comprised of the same makeup – Team Leader, Assault Rifle Specalist, a Grenadier, and a Rifleman. While all of the soldiers are unique and have their own personalities, Alpha Team is just as capable of handling an objective as Bravo team is, individually. The trick is, both teams are absolutely required to progress through the game – it just isn’t possible to complete most missions by focusing only on a single squad. Why is this? Because of the novel way that the game has implemented the concept of “cover”. Unlike most titles, where players can just manually aim at the tiny corner of some bastard’s head to score a kill, even if he’s crouched and barely visible behind a crate, Full Spectrum Warrior implements a kind of invulnerable cover system. As long as a soldier has a piece of cover between him and an attacking enemy, he will never get hit and take damage / die – it just simply will not happen due to the way the game is programmed. Likewise, this applies to the enemy, and since terrorists cling to sandbags, ruined cars, and even abandoned refrigerators like flies on some curious smelly brown substance, taking down an entrenched tango often involves far more effort than just yelling “CHARGE!” and running forward, guns blazing. And this is why both squads have to be used. Men behind cover will be invulnerable to attack, but only from the opposing side of cover. If someone gets to the side or behind, the exposed man will get cut to ribbons in an instant. Using this knowledge, engagements come down to who can flank an enemy position rather than who has the biggest gun.

But were the game all about taking cover and flanking foes, Full Spectrum Warrior would not be much of an interesting strategy title. To add more flexibility to game strategy, the game takes into account the fact that the bulk of the terrorist army effectively relies on stupid office workers who have never held a stolen Ak-47 before in their life and are grossly under-trained compared to your teams of bad-ass soldiers, meaning they tend to fall apart under fire. This makes suppression fire an incredibly viable option, as the terrorists will duck and take cover under fire or blindly wail away at a single team, barely taking notice of the second squad sneaking up on their three-o-clock. This leads to another critical aspect of gameplay – using one team to tie up an enemy by blindly slinging hundreds of deadly projectiles at their position while the second one tries to move to a covered location that has a better shot. The interface makes this job easy, as icons above enemy positions will clearly indicate if they are behind cover, out in a position where your current squad has a clear shot, or are in the process of being suppressed by friendly fire and are too busy kissing the ground to bother returning fire. Let me summarize this entire system with an example. Alpha team comes up to a corner and peers around, spotting a single enemy up the road to one side, standing behind a crate. Noticing Alpha, the trigger-happy terrorist begins shouting foreign gibberish and begins squeezing off ammo. Since Alpha team is behind effective cover while leaning around the corner (as indicated by the shield icon above the heads of my men), they are effectively save from the terrorist attack. I select Alpha Squad and push X to order a “Point Fire” maneuver, then position the small on-screen circle over the terrorists’ position. Two members of Alpha team then stack up at the corner, lean around, and start laying down fire. The terrorist cries out in alarm and crouches down, effectively suppressed. This is good, but since the terrorist is still behind cover and not going anywhere, I can’t harm him.

Seizing the moment, I select Bravo team and have them run like hell across the road to a wrecked vehicle, on a side covering them from the crazy terrorist’s attacks. Because Alpha is still able to keep the terrorist busy and my Bravo boys are behind cover (terrorists have a nasty habit of homing in on any friendlies not behind cover, even if another team is trying to suppress them), I’m able to move Bravo again, this time further up the road. Stacking up behind a random couch strewn in the street, they find themselves effectively on the terrorist’s flank, where there are no sandbags protecting him, and are able to cut him down. Alpha can them move up to support Bravo from any further surprises in safety. This is a really basic example, and there are often numerous other gameplay elements that can affect how the fight will go (such as grenades, or even degrading cover that will fall apart when under fire), but there you have it. The whole “cover = partial invulnerability” thing might be a little hard to stomach at first, but it really pushes the gameplay in an interesting new direction.

Speaking of grenades, each team has a Grenadier armed with an M203, capable of sending shaped explosives to a target (in a straight trajectory, surprisingly enough) that can effectively annihilate entrenched targets directly, without the need for an elaborate flanking maneuver. The downsides are that it is incredibly hard to aim accurately to ensure a kill, and the very limited ammo (3 grenades, though I think this is even less on the game’s harder difficulty level). Nevertheless, it’s a very effective tool to get out of sticky situations. Also at the player’s disposal is an M-67 frag grenade, which is much easier to deploy than the M203, but has an insanely short range – sometimes I think that even I could throw further than these guys. Finally, smoke grenades are also available as an essential utility weapon for providing artificial, temporary cover when running across large expanses of terrain under enemy fire. Normal hand-held grenades can be tossed by any team member, but the M203 can only be fired by the Grenadier (obviously, since he’s the only one carrying an M203), making this one lost option if that soldier is wounded in action. More on wounded soldiers in a sec.

The interface in Full Spectrum Warrior is incredibly easy to use and very well designed, something that surprised me initially given my skepticism at a console-based strategy game, which I fully expected to be fighting the controls of due to lack of a mouse. Every button on the Xbox controller is put to full use, and the “hands off” slow-paced gameplay of FSW makes controlling teams a snap, even under intense conditions. Rotating the camera is done with the right thumbstick, with an instant zoom function available to verify distant targets (and make for easier M203 aiming) available via left trigger. The right trigger activates a kind of 3D “fog of war” function, which will blur out zones where your soldiers are not looking (and as thus should be considered a threat – soldiers can’t shoot or respond to what they cannot see). The left trigger is one of the most important, as it activates the movement cursor for interacting with the terrain. The movement cursor is a 3d artificial object that sticks to the terrain and clips against walls and obstacles, allowing the player to easily issue orders from his limited field of view (there is no top-down or isometric perspective in FSW, the player is always right in the action). The movement cursor indicates the exact position and formation that each squad member will be in when he arrives, with an icon at the lower right of the screen displaying when the cursor is against cover and what kind of cover it is, such as a corner to lean around, or an open-terrain object to hide behind. The A button is secondary in importance, as it is used in a context-sensitive manner to accept the current command, such as a movement or fire order. X causes the “point fire” circle to appear, which is used to specifically indicate where your team will scan for hostiles and fire if necessary. Finally, Y and B are used to switch between Alpha or Bravo teams and cancel the current order, while the White button will answer the incessant annoyance of an incoming demand over the radio to report in, and Black will call up a neato handy GPS tracker. Oh, and the D-Pad can be used to shift the camera focus on squad members other than the Team Leader, such as the Grenadier or Rifleman.