Full Spectrum Warrior

Military Strategy games have a hard time appealing to everyone. Make it too much of a sim, and it can become a crowded, buggy mess. Make it too simple, and you can lose immersion among the simplified UI and arcadey combat. Full Spectrum Warrior is more suited to the latter than the former, but manages to avoid some of the pitfalls of streamlined action-strategy games. If you've played games like Brothers in Arms, you'll have a good idea of what FSW has to offer. In fact, the game cribs very heavily from Gearbox's WW2 FPS series. You're put in control of one or more teams of soldiers or armored vehicles, and must coordinate their fire and movement to out-maneuver enemies. The mechanics are simple, and fun, and can be quite challenging in some areas. Unfortunately, you're not given too many options to move around, and flanking spots are made pretty obvious by the game design. Otherwise, everything's very streamlined, and you won't run into too many issues with glitches or AI. FSW is a game with solid, easy-to-grasp concepts, and manages to throw enough surprises to keep the game feeling fresh from the beginning to end. there's not much to this game besides the feeling of achievement by overcoming its obstacles with minimal loss of life. It's a fun little campaign that you may play again to see if you can do better than you did on your last run. It's best appreciated as a thinky little action game that you finish off on a lazy weekend.

Played this back on the old X-Box. It was a challenge and a lot of fun. You will learn something so the next time you're playing ArmA and someone calls bounding overwatch or something along that line you'll know what they mean. Suppress and flank is the name of the game. Caution is the watchword. You have to think about your tactics, analyze the situation, and develop a plan of attack using both fireteams.

This is a tough game and you will get killed a lot. So the rare save points turns the game into a tedious exercise of playing hour-long campaigns over and over again. This is a really cheap thing developers do to extend game play IMO. I finished it for the sake of finishing it and put the game away for good.

I have played my share of squad based tactics and this one kept me engaged from start to finish. The units work fairly well and respond as would be expected, they moan sometimes, duck and cover when need to and swear at some of the horrors of war. I would of liked them to be a bit more human as in games like the jagged alliance series and specops the line but that's a different story. Wounds and damage was quite interesting in the view of realism. When a soilder is hit you hear them swear and a message saying 'private name was just hit' . However there is no obvious change in their movement speed or accuracy strangely enough. If a soilders is 'down' there is a slow mo animation of them flying around like a ragdoll. On the bit more realistic side there is a time consuming mechanic where you must carry the wounded back some distance providing covering fire and smoke with the other soilders. On the down side the graphics look a bit dated and the friendly AI is not perfect. Also the save system of sitreps and reloading saves was a bit unwiedly but it's not game breaking. I would of liked the units to respond a little quicker to getting shot at or getting orders. The TLs could be briefer as their team becomes more used to them. All in all I quite enjoyed this one but I can understand why some people would gripe about it.