Fortunately the first shots aren't very accurate and you get time to hit the deck again but one of your team isn't so lucky. From the cursing and swearing it's probably Hornster but he isn't out of the fight yet - with a loud yelled expletive he proceeds to open up with an M60. Someone flings a grenade and suddenly you can't hear much of anything anymore, just a loud ringing tone, and it leaves you prone with your M1 Garand looking for muzzle flashes from the enemy - firing for those. Thirty seconds later with the VC retreating further up the path and three of their number dead it grows quiet again. Crocker scrambles over first to check Hornster's wounds which are fortunately light and then to check if you and Nhut have been hurt. Your hearing quietly returns to normal and the wildlife noises pick up again.

Welcome to Vietnam, circa 1967.

That is all in-game experience from fairly early in the single player portion of Vietcong, the new FPS game from Pterodon. It hopefully gives you an idea of the attention to detail plus the immersiveness this game has to offer. Vietcong is all about evoking the kind of experiences United States of America Special Forces faced in that conflict with the result that several careful design choices have been made. Not all of them have worked but enough that the game is quite a fun ride into a conflict not often explored before in the world of first person shooters.

Lets start with the basics - you are Sergeant First Class Steve Hawkins, a recently appointed Intelligence officer assigned to a special forces group stationed at Nui Pek forward base, a few miles from the Cambodian border. The group's function is to help persuade the Montagnard locals to join in the cause and fight against the communist forces coming down from North Vietnam as well as itself doing frequent recon and combat patrols.

Flying in by chopper,
'Ride of the Valkyries' music optional.

The single player story opens with you literally on the chopper flying in, providing quite a good view of the base and environs around it. Shortly after landing you are shown your bunker quarters which will become one of the main interfaces you use between missions to learn more about the weapons, your teammates, read your diary (which has some neat details related in it) and soak up the musical ambience of the Armed Forces Radio Station. The radio station is quite well done with a selection of licenced period tunes as well as pieces 'inspired' by tunes of the era, interspersed is some commentary with news reports and the like from the radio disc jockey.

An immediate dust off
after you leave the chopper.

Pop back out from your bunker and you are straight into your first mission to go meet and greet some village locals. Would it be a huge surprise to let you know that this plan doesn't quite go smoothly? Given that this was the war that S.N.A.F.U. and F.U.B.A.R. came into common lexicon useage with we don't think we are giving anything away. Indeed it seems that very rarely does anything go as planned when you are controlling Steve. Which is the first major divergance from reality the game makes. Think of it as living the worst and best highlights of Steve's tour of duty while missing out on the vast swathes of dull routine that intersperse military life. The diary entries do fill the gap by making this clear with references to events that occur away from the missions you play but it is easy to miss this if you just quickly play the game and don't take in any of the side detail provided.

This S.N.A.F.U. factor also has a couple of other effects. Firstly the detailed mission briefings are almost entirely redundant in a lot of ways. In point of fact the mistake was made of following the mission briefing in one particular P.O.W. extraction that made matters impossible. Till we checked around and found that the constraints placed on you in the mission briefing are not binding at which point an easier solution was found. The second effect is that there is an awful lot of foul language in the game. Combine it with the fairly realistic death animations and you have a game that easily earns the mature rating it has received. Drill Sergeants, while not up to 'Full Metal Jacket' standards, do cuss and swear at you during training. Troopers will frequently curse both when hit and at the enemy when contact occurs - Hornster the machine-gunner is particularly good for this. Finally the scripted dialog for your character is frequently blue tongued as generally you have to react to some seriously messed up combat missions.

Part of a second team waiting near a broken bridge.
The bridge dates back to French colonial days.

The missions break into three major types. Patrol/Assault where you know the enemy is nearby and your entire team goes to see what is there. Singleton affairs where you are either stranded or turn into an impromptue tunnel rat. Or the defensive missions where your team has to hold a position against heavy attack. Each type has quite a few variations within it so you are very rarely bored. Frustration however does occur from time to time with the first tunnel rat missions overstaying their fun factor by a bit. Also occasional night missions get very tricky due to the extreme darkness the game renders, realistic it may well be but fun it isn't. Worse yet such levels can only be played when the lighting around your computer is exactly right - forget trying to play during the day time without ramping your gamma setting through the roof. Thankfully such levels are rare and you can settle into the main meat of the game - the combat.

Here the game really shines. The AI, while still quite capable of some seriously odd behavior from time to time, is perhaps the most impressive seen in a FPS in a while. Friendly and enemy units will routinely seek cover, flee from grenades where possible, practice covering fire while advancing, often flank your position using cover, retreat for reinforcements and generally behave in a very smart fashion indeed. This makes it one of a select few games that you don't feel the need to babysit your AI teammates. The converse is true infact, with your teammates often having to haul your bacon out of the fire. You can issue orders to them but it is a testament to how well they work that most of the time you don't need or want to do so. Usually the orders you give will be to summon a specific teammate so that you can make use of their expertise. Defort, the radioman, gets this perhaps the most as you radio in situation reports including requesting the odd air or artillery strike. Perhaps the nicest thing is that the AI can be fooled and one of the most satisfying moments you get in the game is managing to sneakily flank an AI that is furiously firing away at your old position still.

Home, sweet home.
Quite a few things are interactive here,
you can even nip over to the firing range.

All in all combat is a joy and quite different from the more indestructible soldier feel many other first person shooter games engender. It is not as realistic as games like Operation Flashpoint or Rainbow Six but the game makers are not kidding when they mention in the manual that cover is vitally important. Rocks, trees, bushes and the like become your friend both to provide direct cover against fire (bushes are not so good here) but also to provide concealment - especially while you are moving.

Enemies react to sound as well as sight so care must be taken to control how much noise you make and how much you expose yourself. With crouching, prone crawling and running/walking movement you have a fair number of options for moving. You can lean to peak around objects and have a 'ready weapon' move as well. This does a variety of different things but fundamentally pulls the current weapon up for use and allows you to sight down the iron sights on the weapon. This is the second game we have seen that does this but Vietcong uses it less as a 'realism' nod alone but more as a gameplay feature. When readying the weapon if you are concealed behind cover then you will automatically stick just your head and some of your upper body out from cover as you bring the weapon to bear - release it and you sink quickly back into cover. When walking it brings your arms up with the weapon and also slows your movement promoting an armed sneaky lethality to gameplay.

Rounding this out you have other touches. Grenades must be first primed by pulling the pin and then physically thrown (often bringing you out of cover to do so) - just remember to throw the thing as holding it for too long gets messy. Guns can be toggled between automatic and semi-auto/single shot firing modes. Damage modeling does reward head or chest shots with quicker kills. Also accuracy is affected by the firing stance you adopt and whether you have readied the weapon or not. All this pushes you into a fairly decent approximation of jungle combat with the same decisions troopers had to make. Dash for cover quickly but be exposed? Or crawl slowly under cover and hope the enemy doesn't move? What about flushing them from cover with a grenade throw? All in all a plethora of small scale tactical decisions have to be made while the enemy AI makes similar choices and, thankfully, similar mistakes.

Your Diary, chock with incidental
detail and worth reading for atmosphere.