Full Spectrum Warrior

I just booted this up recently on my new PC and somehow it worked without a single flaw (installed on OS drive, Windows XP compatibility mode). A couple of years ago it wouldn't even boot, so maybe try it now!!! When I originally played this game on the first Xbox, it grabbed me by my love for strategy games with its unique take on real-time tactics. I remember it definitely not being a great game but I never forgot those mechanics. After probably about 15 years, the game is pretty much as I remember. I still love moving my squads through hostile territory, cover to cover, down alleys and streets, across plazas and markets. Setting firing sectors for each soldier ever so deliberately, laying down covering fire so I can move other squads safely. Unfortunately, the overall game design is sorely lacking. Level design leaves much to be desired, both enemy and friendly AI are a huge pain, controls and camera are very clunky, bugs, I could go on. Oddly, sometimes I found it to be too easy, which is when I discovered that the difficulty settings are horribly conceived. Play it on medium difficulty and you'll find yourself with only 1/3 the amount of supplies, twice as many enemies, ambushes, inaccurate friendlies, deadlier foes, unfair enemy placement... it drove me nuts. So I had to finish the game on the lowest diffulty which I found to be almost too forgiving with eerily sparse enemies. With all that said, I would actually love to see a modern iteration of this game. I'm not a huge fan of games that basically serve as US military propaganda, but honestly I think the developers were really onto something with these game mechanics. I've personally never played another game like this and I'll never forget it. I have to say it's worth playing if you like real-time tactics, and you may very well enjoy it if you keep in mind everything I've said here. TIP: each individual soldier can be given unique firing orders (read the manual, this is not covered in the tutorial)

Rating: 4 out of 10 I tried this game multiple times over the years but did never finish it due to boredom. The gameplay resembels more a puzzle game than a tactical sim, since the levels are too small and too linear. And the controls combined with the rigid camera view are a chore, Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers is better in every way. - awkward controls - linear levels with invisble walls - stupid a.i.

1. What is Full Spectrum Warrior? It´s a real-time strategy game from 2004 created by Pandemic Studios/THQ. You will control 2 fireteams from the US military in the middle east. The missions vary a bit from destroy, protect, rescue hostages and capture objectives. The game is split into 10 chapters and can be played in singleplayer and multiplayer coop as well (but gamespy is dead!). You´re gonna move the two squads separately, that means that you just giving orders with your mouse where to move, which areas to cover and which targets to attack. Your men have different weapons and grenade types which you will need to use to go through the campaign. 2. Technical things The game runs fine on Windows 10 64 bit and needs about 2.1 GB of your harddisk space. 3. What does the game right? -good tutorial to learn the basic tactics and controls -good controls overall, but sometimes the coversystem doesn´t work correctly -storyline is okay and pretty forgettable, but it´s all about the tactical and thrilling gameplay in the end -long campaign with 10 chapters, which took me about 16 h -difficult but rewarding experience (trial and error) -fair save game system 4. What does the game wrong? -you will need to overlook the dated graphics from 2004 -the game is hard (you will die a lot) and you need to be very patient due to the slow gameplay mechanics -gameplay is a bit repetetive because of the simple but effective controls and orders

It was a gread game back in the day, but the graphics and clunky controls make it a slight pain to play. Just getting the game to start at first is borderline impossible. It makes my 4k monitor flicker as it switches resolution because the intro logos are in some ancient resolutions. While flickering stuff on my other two screens gets jumbled around, and the game ends up minimizing, which switches my 4k back to the original resolution. The dance continues until I can finally manage to get to the main menu and change the screen resolution in game. Only for it to start again as soon as one of the pre-rendered videos play. Finally got it to actually run pretty well by checking "Disable Full Screen Optimizations" on the Compatibility tab in Properties on the game's shortcut and also opening the "Resolution.cfg" file in the game's folder and changing the whole thing to: "3840 2160 0" I'm not sure which setting is the one that helped, but even still I got to a point in the game where the dialogue audio gets all messed up. In it's current state, this 17 year old game isn't worth the price they're asking for it. I'd probably happily pay double this asking price for a remastered bundle of both games though!

I remember loving this gamer on Xbox back 17 years ago, but boy do I hate this game now. The camera is terrible, the controls on pc are clunky at best, the AI for both enemies and your squad mates is abyssmal, and the game is just plain boring. I gave this three stars because I used to love and because there are so few games that give you squad based tactics like this - the Arma series being one of the few that come to mind.