 | Vietcong 2 PC Review - 30/10/2005
Vietcong 2, the second outing of the hugely successful Vietcong series, takes the player into the ancient city of Hue set in the 1968 Tet (New Year) Offensive created by the Czech Republic's very own Pterodon Studios.
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| After an unusual opening section that seeing you lying in a brothel looking rather unsatisfied by the brunette next to you, you are interrupted by a fellow solider and ordered back to base to escort a US war reporter to a party in the town hall. One minute your toasting the New Year with the Mayor of Hue, then all of a sudden you duck an RPG and the bullets begin to fly around the town hall as, you have to fight your way back to the MACV (Military Assistance Command: Vietnam) base.
Despite switching from the jungle to the gritty, fairly ugly looking city of Hue (pronounced Hoo-ay), the game still retains a lot of similarities to the previous instalment and the intensely brutal fighting seen in Vietcong 1 is still present here. This Vietnam game, unlike the majority of the others, allows you to play from the perspective of both the US and the Vietcong.
The main part of the game is the single player campaigns. For the US campaign you play the part of Daniel Boone, after you’ve brought your whining war reporter back to the US base, you join up with your squad. The squad command system is rather basic, with commands pretty much limited to “Follow Me”, “Go Over There” , and “Shoot Them” which seems fairly similar to the squad commands from Brothers in Arms, but works well nevertheless. Your squad contains a variety of characters such as an Engineer, who carries seemingly |
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unlimited ammo and with a touch of the comma button, runs over to fill you up with all the bullets you need to take on the Vietcong. The other important squad member is the Medic, who can bring you back from the brink of death in just a few quiet moments, giving you a full health bar whenever you're down. There’s also the radioman and the gunner, both of whom seem to just be there to fill out the squad and have no special function.
Continuing with the ever-so-slight lack of realism theme present in Vietcong 2, your squad mates seem invincible. They can get shot and look slightly unhappy with that, occasionally falling to the floor, but they they get up and fill the poor Vietcong with lead. Of course this tempts you to, whenever you get stuck on a particular section, simply send in the squad to clear out any enemies that would otherwise tear us not-so-invincible people to shreds.
Mentioning that, Vietcong 2 isn’t your general FPS (first person shooter) where you charge in, shooting anything that moves, grab some conveniently placed health packs and dive straight back into the thick of things. With a quick spray of bullets a Vietcong guerrilla can reduce your nice full health bar to nothing (or with an unlucky headshot he could do it in one) therefore being CAREFUL in the name of the game here, using cover and the helpful ‘lean’ button to stick your head round corners to see who’s waiting for you. Another good feature is the aiming, pressing the right mouse button brings your gun up so you stare down the barrel at your targets ,making you have to work for your headshots. Both of these features attempt to add a sense of realism to the battle sequences but generally the rest of the game fails in that regard.
The A.I. is a bit of a mixture, with computer controlled enemies and allies expressing generally good intelligence, although at times the lack of it, is amazingly shocking. Enemies generally duck behind cover then pop up and shoot back, unless they’re being suppressed, but they do seem to lack movement, leaving them vulnerable to a well-aimed grenade. Also your squad has the same mixture, they can duck and hide…then run straight through an open space or across your line of fire, which can be very annoying at times. Generally the squad A.I. and command system doesn’t come close to the good old classics of Ghost Recon and Rainbow 6. Perhaps Pterodon was trying to hit a middle ground with Vietcong 2, attempting to appeal both to the fans who like the squad shooters, and those who prefer ‘old fashioned’ solo FPS’ers like Halo or going further back, Goldeneye.
The length of the campaigns is also a bit of a letdown. The storyline to the US campaign is a little anticlimactic and Vietcong campaign seems to just be a few levels thrown on almost as an afterthought. Despite the occasional tricky patch, I’m writing this review only two days after first getting my paws of a copy of the game.
The VC campaign takes us back to the jungle, which looks much better than the drab, ugly urban environments of Hue, but shortly after you are joined by a squad conveniently containing another Medic and Engineer you realise that this is going to be very similar to the US campaign. Seeing as you are now a Vietnamese peasant on an uprising, you and your squad mates speak no English, and after hearing the same phrases repeated throughout the US campaign this seems to actually bea bonus. Seeing as this is toted at the top of the features list, I find it a bit disappointing that the VC campaign is so short.
For me though the biggest letdown was the technical side of the game. On a high-end machine the game suffered from long load-up times and a lot of juddering slow-down. Generally this can’t be accepted in a FPS where a small mistake will see you restarting from the last quick-save point. Puzzlingly the graphics don’t seem that challenging when compared to other recent FPS offerings, most notably Half-Life 2. They just seem a few years out of date, with the animations being awkward and irritating. The characters' faces seem fairly realistic, but then you notice they are stuck onto bodies that move in very clumsy ways and don’t seem to fit in with the environment.
The multiplayer feature in this game gives us the standard modes, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and as a bonus, a co-operative mode, where up to 8 people can gang up on the A.I on 4 maps. This looks like it will prove very popular and the other modes have 9 fairly large maps to annihilate your fellow gamers in. With a selection of player classes, similar to the classes in your squad in the campaign modes, and old favourites providing the bulk of the game types the multiplayer mode, this isn’t giving us anything really new or surprising, although being able to drive vehicles is a nice addition. The multiplayer looks like it will be the key factor in the replayability of Vietcong 2 but I doubt it will make up for the lack of longevity and other problems in the single player game.
Fans of the first title will probably want to try out the multiplayer but I don’t think it’s worth buying just for that. Players with low-end PCs may want to keep a book or something handy for the fairly hefty loading times between levels but users with better systems shouldn’t have too much trouble. The graphics seem three years or so out of date and making little advancement from the original despite huge leaps forward in games since then.
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The general feel of this game is one big “not quite”. It definitely isn’t a BAD game, it’s just average and with other, better first person shooters out and looming on the horizon, such as F.E.A.R and Call of Duty 2, Vietcong 2 doesn’t look set to create much of an impact in the market. In my opinion, there are better games to spend your hard-earned cash on.
By Daniel Lee - Xbox and PC Writer |
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