Review (PC, M-Rated)

Finally. Somebody got Vietnam right. This shooter accomplishes what it set out to do better than any other FPS I've ever played. Not necessarily any other game, but easily any other shooter. And what's even more impressive is that what it set out to do is really hard, namely to simulate infantry combat in the Vietnam war. The obvious caveat here is that what the game really does is accurately portray what I *think* infantry combat in Vietnam was like. How the hell should I know what it was really like? I wasn't there, and I'd wager neither was any of the developers. Nevertheless, culturally we've all been thoroughly exposed to the realities of the war, and to the nature of its combat. Furthermore, we make second hand intuitive judgements about authenticity all the time, and necessarily so. I can tell the difference between a good war movie and a bad one, between good sci-fi and bad sci-fi, etc.. And even more importantly, it's obvious that Pterodon, the game's developers, were very concerned about the authenticity of their game. It's no accident that Vietcong is as good as it is. The credits include a long list of entities which contributed to the game's authenticity: weapons consultants, vehicle consultants, botanical consultants, linguists, museums, historical societies, shooting ranges, military organizations, a Navy Seal team, etc.. Pterodon did their homework.

So, having established that Vietcong is precisely what it aspires to be, we're left with the question of whether or not that is any fun.

The proverbial question...

...boringly elicits the proverbial answer: 'it depends'. I'll be the first to admit that Vietcong's gameplay is going to be anathema to some. It's combat is punishingly unforgiving, and the game makes no apologies for it. If you like your shooters fast, foot-loose, and fancy-free, then you should give Vietcong a very wide berth. Over the course of the game, you will certainly rack up an impressive number of kills, probably the only truly unrealistic aspect of the game, but make no mistake: your survival is nearly as tenuous as your enemies'. The singleplayer combat is extremely unforgiving of mistakes, both in tactics and in execution, and doubly so for multiplayer, where the few concessions provided by the AI are absent.

If I haven't yet made it explicitly clear, let me do so: Vietcong is a combat simulation. It makes no excuses for what happens to the player when he/she does not respect the rules of the simulation. Some games go to great lengths to cater to the player, to ritualistically avoid making the player feel as though they are doing poorly. Vietcong operates on the assumption that you are in its environment because you want to be there, not in spite of its challenges but specifically because of them, and that if you do poorly it is your own damn fault. If you do not respect what the game expects of you, and for what it has no tolerance, then the experience will be excruciatingly frustrating and unfun. To put it in context, if you just run around the jungle, you're going to get killed. If you just stand up in the middle of a fire fight to empty your clip into the green abyss, you're going to get killed. If you don't stick with your team, you're going to get killed and likely some of them are going to get killed. If you don't manage your position relative to your enemy, you're going to get flanked and killed. If you don't use cover and be quiet, you're going to get killed. You get the idea. If you were a recruit, fresh out of boot camp, I imagine these are exactly the kinds of things that your sergeant would be telling you. On the flip side, the simulation delivers what you expect of it, and rewards you if you abide by the rules. If you're pinned down, call for your squadmates to cover you. If you're injured, your medic will heal you. If you're out of ammo, your engineer will resupply you. If you trust your pointman, you will avoid deadly VC traps and ambushes.

The game almost never feels unfair (there were a few sniping incidents that had me cursing). Success is actually very easy to achieve, provided that you never forget where you are, and what you need to do (and more importantly *NOT* do) in order to keep yourself and your squadmates alive. But this is the linchpin for enjoyment of the experience. Vietcong does not, repeat *NOT*, accommodate wildly variant player desires. If you don't enjoy a slower-paced shooter punctuated with moments of pandemonium requiring surgical focus, using cover and covering fire, at times actually *avoiding* combat, and dedicating paranoid attention to your surroundings, then Vietcong has nothing for you. You will not have fun and the experience will be a succession of miserable failures. The game offers a particular kind of combat and nothing else, which is why I said earlier that I have no doubt it can be anathema to some players. The converse, of course, is that if you're a devotee of this kind of simulation: (a) you know who you are, and (b) you're in for a very rare treat.

Good

• Having a South Vietnamese soldier act as pointman for your squad is a stroke of genius. While it certainly solves some gameplay issues (such as allowing the player to focus on combat and squad management instead of navigating and finding traps), his presence is one of many factors in the game that help manifest the social complexity of the war (see below for further discussion).

• Along the same lines, the diary of Hawkins (the player) is a very well executed window into the experiences of a U.S. soldier in Vietnam, including the social and cultural issues with which they had to deal. I'm not talking Pulitzer stuff here, but it's a hell of a lot to get from a game. It's not like we expect that kind of thing from a shooter at all, let alone that it be good.

• This might sound odd, but the credits are wicked cool! Seriously. The credits play out against the backdrop of an in-engine skirmish between U.S. and VC forces in a river valley, with some vintage music accompanying. The elevated view on the fighting provides a perspective unlike any had during play, and nurtures an even higher appreciation of the game's AI behavior, as you get to see them moving around, taking cover, firing short bursts, etc.

• The water effects are some of the best I've seen, and not because it's so believable as water, but because it does such a good job of looking like *flowing* water. I didn't recognize this until I just wrote that sentence, but most games go for hyper-realistic water by modeling it as a surface of standing water. The many creeks and streams in Vietcong are so much more believable because they look like flowing creeks and streams. The screenshots don't do it justice at all, you've got to see it live.

• Shooting the machine gun out the side of a UH-1 Huey is good fun. You get to do it a couple of times over the course of the game and frankly I would've liked to have done it a couple of times more than that.

• Allowing you to hang out around camp in between missions is another stroke of genius. There's no dorky RPG elements, or scripted conversations. Just your bunk, a radio playing 70's rock, a desk (with junk on it that gets shuffled between missions for another little touch of immersion). I'll admit that I didn't read all of the supplemental content available during these downtimes, like the weapon/vehicle profiles, but I think I read all of the diary and mission debriefings, and frequently went out to shoot bottles on the range. I mentioned in my Halo review how important it is to allow the player to mentally decompress in between stressful sessions. The opportunity to kill a few minutes between missions, without taking you away from the immersion of the game's settings, is terrific. I also appreciate the fact that when you load your saved game (assuming it isn't a quicksave in the middle of a mission) you're in the camp. I used this as a way to re-acclimate myself to the game's setting anytime I hadn't played it for a few days, just to get back in the mindset of Hawkins. The only thing better would be if you had a bit more freedom to go around the rest of the camp and maybe interact with some of the other soldiers (a la Wing Commander -- it's amazing how a little character interaction turned an arcade space shooter into such a memorable, 'epic' game).

• I managed to grab one of the M-rated copies from GoGamer when they very briefly had it in stock. I think the only difference between it and the T-rated version is an increase in the blood/gore for kills (which still sits squarely in the 'understated' camp for my desensitized gamer mind) and some profanity. Well, ok maybe more than some profanity. The language isn't over the top, it's exactly the way I imagine young men stuck in a jungle killing other young men stuck in a jungle would talk.

Bad

• Just a few complaints: picking up items off the ground is a little cumbersome, since it seems to require pinpoint accuracy in your pointing, and often items are jumbled up next to each other after they've been coughed out of a dead body. I would have welcomed the frob highlighting effect from the Thief games here.

• There were one or two occasions when I legitimately did not know how to proceed. Typically it was in the tunnels. After the fact, I discovered that you can mark the walls with your knife, giving you a 'cookie crumb' method of tracking where you've been. I also made a note that I got confused about blowing the trench during the Nui Pek defense, but I don't remember what the problem was.

• Speaking of the tunnels, they've gotten a *lot* of bad press in other reviews. Eh. I didn't think they were that bad. But I was generally having a hoot during the whole game anyway, and it may be that those who have complained the loudest about the tunnel sections already weren't having a good time and the tunnels just pushed them over the edge. They're admittedly not the best part of the game, but weren't *that* bad.

• I didn't care for the protagonist in the expansion pack (Fist Alpha). He was a much more stereotypical American Dudly Do-Right than Hawkins (the first protagonist).

Ugly

• Um... uh... I can't get my friends to play with me, because "there's no rocket launcher".

• Ok, no wait, I've got one: the quick-switch command is very aggravating because it treats *everything* you pick up as a viable item to which you might want to switch quickly. For instance, that worthless piece of North Vietnamese communist propaganda you just pilfered off a dead VC. Sure, I want to quick switch to that in the middle of a firefight, instead of to my flippin' grenades, which *were* my designated quick-switch item until I picked up the propaganda pamphlet.

Beautiful

• The AI, both enemy and friendly, is fantastic. Your squadmates are not meat shields. Rather, their survival is vital to your survival. In fact, most missions fail if you get a squadmate killed. In a poorly implemented game, that would be a recipe for chronic frustration, but I only recall a handful of times that I had to replay a section because a squadmate got killed. You don't have to babysit them. As for the enemy AI, they're both tactical and wickedly deadly. The only reason that I didn't score the AI at 3 is because as you dial the difficulty, they just get more deadly and not more tactical. As always, I'd love to have seen a more pronounced difference in enemy intelligence between the difficulty levels, instead of just enemy reactions.

• Kudos to Pterodon for even partly reflecting the moral ambiguity of the war. This isn't the black & white struggle against evil that gives all of the WWII games a free pass at having to address the larger context of warfare. The game's treatment of Vietnam, as a country, conflict, people, is easily as well done as can be expected in what is essentially just a shooting gallery game. All of the VC speak in Vietnamese, and are portrayed as a legitimate fighting force. There's a mission that deals with the U.S. forces' interaction with indigenous villages forced to pursue guerrilla fighting against the VC on one hand and deal with their mistrust of the U.S. on the other. Granted, the game steers clear of any of the bottom-rung details, like raping, killing civilians, burning villages, etc.. Still, to even attempt to respectfully portray the complexities of the war, let alone to succeed at it, shows a lot of guts on the part of the developer

• Even more important than showing moral complexities is the fact that their graphics engine does such an awesome job convincing me I'm in a freakin' jungle. Just kidding, that's not really more important, but I was waxing way too serious for a game review. Honestly, though, the game does an amazing job of creating a convincing jungle environment. And I misspoke - it's not just the graphics, it's the graphics combined with the phenomenal audio, combined with the little touches like the occasional frog jumping off the trail or a small flock of tropical birds startled out of the brush. The game isn't going to win the Most-Polygons or Best-Textures award, and I frankly don't care. The overall impression is capital!

• Vietnam Mode. If you activate Vietnam mode, the game turns off all of the HUD indicators. No target reticle, no radar, no ammo/clip count, no health meter, no crouch/prone/standing icon. Nothing in front of your bloodshot eyes except your weapon and the jungle. If that doesn't make your thalamus light up, then I'm surprised you've read this far because you probably already decided that this combat simulation isn't for you. I admit that I don't always, or even usually, play in Vietnam mode. But it's there, and the world is a better place for it.

• Co-op!!!! Thank the gods on high! For nearly every shooter I play that involves squad tactics, my first thought is: "goddamn this would be fun if I could play this campaign cooperatively with friends." Well, Vietcong to the rescue. Not since Ghost Recon has a shooter stood up and endorsed co-op so strongly. Thanks guys!

Summary

Vietcong is like the flight sim of shooters. I probably could have put that statement at the top of the review and called it done. A few minutes in a flight sim, such as Falcon4, and you'll know whether or not you ever want to have anything to do with flight sims again. The same is true for Vietcong. After the first mission, you'll either be singing its praises or going back to the Quake clones. Granted, if there was a hardcore spectrum for all games, Vietcong would probably be below all of the flight sims, but still above all but maybe one or two shooters. Vietcong is more accessible than a flight sim for the simple reason that it is more instinctually intuitive to shoot at people than it is to fly airplanes.

So is it even worth asking my ceremonial question, 'Is the game fun'? Yes, because every time I ask it I restate that the biggest influence on the answer is you, or rather me, since I'm only answering the question from my own perspective. I loved Vietcong. It's well designed, well implemented, refined, immersive, and unapologetic of its unwavering focus on a very specific experience. I'm not necessarily always in the mood to play it, but that's as it should be. I don't want one game to be what I want all of the time, I want there to always be at least one game that is what I want at any given time. When I want to be in the Vietnam war, that one game is Vietcong.