ith the rampant popularity of military-themed video games, players and fans alike have craved on thing more than any other: realism. Those finicky folk want everything to be as life-like as possible, from visuals, weaponry, and tactics. Well, tomorrow you’ll get a chance to get your hands on perhaps the most realistic military game every made; THQ’s Full Spectrum Warrior. Originally a title commissioned by the Army as a means of training troops, the title offers up perhaps the most intense and realistic military experience to hit a home consoles in quite a long time. And, even more amazingly, it does so by following some gameplay mechanics that you may not initially associate with a game of its type.

For those unfamiliar with Full Spectrum Warrior, the game follows a group of military soldiers as they are deployed to the tumultuous (and quite fictional) country of Zekistan. It seems that an evil dictator has been terrorizing the country, and as a result, foreign troops have been sent in to quell the violence and restore order to the overall country. Each character has their own unique stories and personalities, from the street-wise guy from the ‘hoods of Philadelphia, to the devoted father and family man with a wife and two kids waiting for him at home. Not surprisingly, the game doesn’t focus much of its attention on the soldiers themselves, but rather as an entire collective. You see, while you are spending much of your time in the game fighting enemies and running around barren cityscapes, you’ll also be trying to keep tabs on and protect your squad mates. After all, no soldier gets left behind.

While military games have traditionally been first person shooters, Full Spectrum Warriors goes an entirely different route, one that combines traditional action gameplay with strategy elements. As such, you don’t actually directly control your squad of soldiers, but rather control them using a cursor-based system of movement. Moving the left analog stick will cause a cursor to move around the ground, indicating that you can move your soldiers to its location. After you’ve chosen a spot to move to, a quick press of the A button will cause your soldiers to move out. The game’s environments, however, are filled to the brim with objects and obstacles, which you cursor will react to accordingly. Say you want to move your squad to the corner of a building. As you move the cursor to the corner, it will light up and show the position that your soldiers will fall into once they make the move. Since you usually want to lead your squad with your team leader, his position will always be highlighted by a glowing circle. Also, when moving the cursor to the corner, a small display on-screen will display a small picture of the corner you want to move to. This picture helps to not only provide you a better idea of what sort of position you’re moving into, but also helps to avoid you trying to move into the wrong position, only to actually move somewhere else because you didn’t judge the location that well.

Getting the hang of moving your soldiers around on the field of battle is pretty easy to pick up, and before you know it, you’ll be moving your squad around like a pro. But, while simplistic, the game really features an extraordinary amount of depth that really makes itself clear once you start getting into hostile engagements. First of all, taking into account the game’s almost mind-boggling realism, all enemies operate under a very high degree of intelligence. They’ll use cover and suppressing fire to both attack and protect themselves. And, once they’ve spotted any of your teams, they’ll open fire. To help even the odds, you and your squad have a number of different options. First of all, when moving around the map, you can “bound,” or move while focusing your attention on a different area. Say I make a mad dash for a burned out car to use as cover. Scoping out the area before I move, I notice that directly opposite of the car is a suspicious looking alleyway. Since I can’t look through walls, there may be an enemy hiding in there, ready to ambush me. To add some security, I can choose to bound, which results in me taking a slower approach to the car as well as focusing my attention (and aim) towards the suspicious alley.

The second feature that helps to keep you and your mates alive is the use of cover. Nearly everything in the game that you can put your body against or behind can be used for cover, including things like wooden crates, burned out cars, walls, rubble, and even abandoned sofas and couches. The catch to cover, though, is the fact that all cover reacts differently to gunfire. When you and your soldiers are hiding behind some sort of cover object, a small white shield will appear above your heads. If you’re stationed behind cover that can’t be destroyed, like a wall or other immovable object, the shield will remain steady and above your heads. If you’re stationed behind something like a wooden crate or a soft, your shield indicator will decrease as the object receives damage. Once the shield is depleted, you’re essentially a sitting duck and open to enemy gunfire. But, enemies too can also use cover to their advantage, and as result, they also sport their own white shield indicators showing how vulnerable they are. Being able to identify and use cover objects is essential during gameplay, and you’ll need to be able to quickly move from object to object if you hope to stand a chance at surviving.

But, what would all these actions and tactics be without some strapping young lads to actually carry them out? Your squad is comprised of four soldiers: the team leader, the autorifleman, the rifleman, and the grenadier. Each soldier type, naturally, has his own unique strengths. The team leader is the obvious leader of the group, shouting out orders and commands to his fellow soldiers. The auto and regular rifleman are adept at laying down cover fire or spraying areas with multiple rounds of ammunition. The grenadier is most helpful when using his trusty grenade launcher to take out lightly armored vehicles form a distance. But, as a group, you also have access to fragmentation grenades and smoke grenades. Frag grenades are handy when trying to take out distance enemies who may be using cover, while smoke grenades are useful for masking your position to enemies, allowing you to move around through the smoke. In all, the soldier types are varied enough to help keep things fresh and give you an overall sense that each one is unique in their roles and abilities. In most levels, you’ll also be able to control more than one team at a time, which you can cycle through with a press of the Y button. While all the soldiers pretty much are the same in regards to abilities, being able to control multiple squads helps to add quite a bit of strategy to the gameplay. Being able to flank and distract enemies with one group while another moves in unnoticed is blessing.

The game follows a pretty strict adherence to realism, and as a result, you can only lose two squad members during any particular level. Once two guys go down, the game is over. To help keep the action going along at a nice pace, and to help hammer down the fact that no solider gets left behind, you’ll need to take care of injured comrades. Scattered throughout levels are special areas where you can take an injured soldier to get worked on by a medic. The catch is, however, is the fact that getting a downed soldier from point A to point B isn’t a walk in the park. To get an injured squad member to the medic requires that he be carried by another solider, which results in slowing down your entire team until you reach your objective. The squad will only move as fast as the man who’s carrying the injured ally, so you’ll need to take this shortcoming into account when you’re trying to find your way to medical help.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the game is the unique replay system. As you play through the game, you’ll run across special checkpoints that save your game as well as save a replay file of all the actions that you’re performed up until that point. If you happen to die after you reach the checkpoint, you can actually load up your replay movie and either watch your actions and try to spot where you went wrong or even watch the movie and then jump right back into the action at any given point. Not only does this system help to alleviate the frustration of having to start entire levels over from the beginning, but it also helps train you in becoming a better soldier. Running into the fray of a battle and getting taken out by a sniper is one thing, but being able to watch your replay movie and actually pinpoint that exact location of that sniper just as he gets the drop on you is a whole other story. And, to make things even more interesting, you can trade replay files over Xbox Live. So, if Johnny Idaho is sitting at home and gets a replay from his friend two states over, he can both watch the replay and even jump into the action whenever he wants.

Visually, the game looks pretty good, but doesn’t seem to really take advantage of the Xbox’s capabilities. While character models and environments are pretty well rendered, they seem to lack the punch that you would expect from a game that is shooting for such a high degree of realism. Also, the game suffers from a pretty jittery camera, which helps to add quite a bit frustration in moving your soldiers about. The right analog stick is used to swivel the camera as well as manipulate its pitch. While helpful in areas that are out in the open, it proves to be pretty uncooperative in close quarters and also tends to get caught on environmental objects at an annoying rate. Also, since the game doesn’t feature a means of actually zooming your viewpoint out to any degree, you’re often times left completely blind when moving about. While the game is trying to be realistic in this manner, it didn’t make much sense to me that I couldn’t move my soldiers to a position that I had just walked by no less than two seconds ago, just because I couldn’t get it into my field of vision.

Audio-wise, the game fares quite a bit better, not only by featuring some nice military-esque tunes from Machinehead (who did the music for the motion picture Black Hawk Down), but also in the fact that sounds plays a huge role in the game. As you’re moving about, your squad mates will alert you to enemy presence by calling out when they’ve spotted them. Often times, this proves to be the difference between life and death, so you learn early on to pay attention to everything that they say, even when they’re mouthing off or just goofing around.

Overall, Full Spectrum Warrior is the perhaps the most realistic military game ever made. The action is intense and follows such a true-to-life mechanic of assessing and engaging in combat, you’ll quickly forget that you’re even playing a game. While the visuals could use a shot in the arm, the game makes up for this shortcoming with some top-notch sound and the highly innovative replay feature. So, forget plasma rifles and rocket launchers, it’s time to enlist for some truly realistic military action.