Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers

Format PC

Developer Pandemic Studios

Publisher THQ

Genre Action, Sim / Strategy

Originally we planned to write this hands-on while sipping away at the premium-strength cider Three Hammers that one of us found in their local CostCutters last month, hopefully producing four-pages of dangerously honest beliefs about supposed weapons of mass destruction, openly derisory comments about George Bush and an anecdote about Saddam, a leper and a sausage which we believed to be funny at the time.

Eventually, we planned, it would descend into a paragraph-straddling drunken slur against misplaced morals, asinine politics and dubious ethics, bereft of spelling and grammar and punctuated by random mentions of the game I'm supposed to be playing, no doubt inserted by a frustrated editor while I nurse a hangover that could level a hippo.

CHEERS, THEN
Maybe it was fortunate then that as I raised the apple-scented paint-stripper to my lips I was immediately stabbed by about 12 icy glares from various official types around the office. Apparently it's frowned upon to get supremely hammered in the workplace, and so I have to write about Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers while sober. Honestly, the things I have to put up with.

You no doubt remember Full Spectrum Warrior as the squad-based strategic shooter that, while making a pretty decent impact on PC, was always an Xbox classic first and foremost. Set in modern-day combat scenarios (a made-up Middle- Eastern town in a made-up Middle-Eastern country), the original game placed you in command of a squad of four troops who must liberate the residents of the fictitious dictatorship in a hail of gunfire and patriotic shouting.

The twist was that you don't directly control any of your men, instead you give orders, set firing sectors, apply suppressing fire, covering fire, chuck grenades about and generally get the job done. Later levels, meanwhile, saw you controlling more than one squad, allowing you to employ complex flanking manoeuvres to outwit and outgun the enemy. That was the gist of FSW - manoeuvre, flank, neutralise and move on.

MAKE IT SO
Ten Hammers is shaping up to be everything Full Spectrum Warrior was, except this time around Pandemic has the freedom to tweak the gameplay towards something a bit more action-orientated. Whereas the original touted a utilitarian, urban warfare-simulating engine actually used to train US soldiers, Ten Hammers is aiming to add more Hollywood flair to the mix, along with a a few manoeuvres that are a little more gung-ho than the marine's last outing.

You've still got all the basics - a couple of squads of four soldiers each with a speciality (riflemannery, grenadery, machine gunnery and team leadery), multiple squads covering one another and manoeuvring into flanking positions, using suppressing fire - all the nitty-gritty real-life strategies supposedly employed by nitty-gritty real-life soldiers. But gone, for example, is the realistic yet potentially confusing 3D fog of war which cloaked the original in fuzzy grey areas, replaced by 360-degrees of pure, unadulterated perception.

Tweaks and changes like this are what constitute Ten Hammers' step away from the simulation genre and towards the probably more lucrative action-shooter genre. Still intact are the gory slow-mo deaths and stalemate standoffs with the locals, the conveniently placed piles of rubble and sandbags - but now there are more rooftops and vantage points. Oh, and you get to drive tanks this time.

Yes, we love tanks, but it was a problem we had with the original: tanks sometimes made cameo appearances but you could never actually tell them what to do. This time around however, they're yours to command in much the same way you command your squads. Controlling a squad consists of right-clicking to bring up a positioning reticule which snaps to corners and walls, and then clicking when you're satisfied with the reticule's position before watching your merry squad sprint towards their intended destination. Left-clicks bring up what experts call a 'firing sector' (or what we call 'the shoot in this general direction-o-meter'), which makes your squad train their sights on a certain area, applying covering fire and liberating the enemy when necessary.

Controlling a tank is much the same, with right-clicks moving you about the sandy streets with unerring grace, and left-clicks deciding which bits of the Middle East you want to destroy at any given time.

It's clear to see that the intuition involved in moving troops around has been left unscathed. In fact, it's been improved - almost every command can be further specified with various radial menus; you can split your squad into two teams of two men, move with caution, drag injured soldiers to safety and access grenades with ease. In addition, you can now take direct control of a single soldier for a brief moment, either to take a pot-shot with your rifleman or launch a liberating grenade or two with your grenadier.

It's a feature that works well, enabling you to precisely pick off or blow up certain targets. The same can be said of the vehicles, with the tank's lethal cannon being directly controllable and turning those wacky insurgents into assorted flying limbs and a fine red mist.

I CAN DO SUMS, ME
The AI has been improved, meaning instead of scripted enemy positions and strategies, you'll often be faced with randomly generated enemies who, while not being smart enough to outflank you (they are untrained madmen after all), can do a pretty good job of staying under cover. It's fair to say that there were a few occasions in which my American hunters and insurgent hunted started playing silly-buggers. For instance, like the time when I successfully flanked a lone terrorist, snuck to within a few feet of his encampment and ordered my troops to "Kill, kill, kill!", before watching them blast holes in the wall behind the evil-doer, who then proceeded to accurately put four holes in the four heads of my four highly-trained soldiers with ease. These are, though, in all probability, the hallmarks of early code rather than anything else.

If you got sweaty-palmed last time around, meanwhile, you've got even more heart palpitations to come - what with the new enemy tactics giving Ten Hammers a faster pace than the first game. Conflicts come thick and fast, usually lasting a few moments, especially when backtracking through places you thought were clear, only to encounter yet more resistance. The excellently engineered set-pieces of the original are here too, forcing you to think laterally in what are almost puzzle-like scenarios (with your squads forced to traverse particularly dangerous streets or flank awkwardly placed enemies). Situations like these usually have more than one solution, requiring some intelligent strategic thought rather than all-out liberation.

DUNES OF HAZARD
Of course, with the addition of a competitive multiplayer mode, Ten Hammers is set to please Full Spectrum Warrior fans looking to shoot one another rather than co-operate. With more action, more detail and more beautifully choreographed teamwork, this will no doubt end up being an intense urban warfare experience waiting to be enjoyed by anybody who's seen some grainy CNN footage of some sand dunes and thought it looked mildly interesting.

It's fair to say that the early code I was fiddling with was like trying to play Tic Tac Toe from 50ft away with a pen tied to a really long stick - with the control configuration menu as yet un-implemented and the tutorial having button icons either missing or from an Xbox controller, I was flying blind. Sure, the interface will be cleaned up and the misplaced icons removed soon enough, but to me it's a sign of Ten Hammers' underlying leaning towards an Xbox release. But these are the times we live in.

Whether or not the tweaks, changes and additions are enough to shake the squad-based shooter tree isn't clear yet, especially as the departure from the original game isn't exactly immense. One thing's for certain though - once the game's released there'll be a cardboard cut-out of a soldier in every game shop, maybe doubling as a shelf for the game, with copies of Ten Hammers embedded in his stomach like shrapnel. It'll be popular too, no doubt thanks to the same TV advert appearing every two minutes. It may even cause army enrolment figures to rise slightly, but will it achieve the greatness required to merit the advertising budget? We'll find out soon.

PC Zone Staff