Vietcong: Fist Alpha

"Stereotype Yankee calling arty on generic Vietnamese bunker…"

After the influx of WWII first person shooters, and before the flood of Vietnam War shooters, there were a couple of games that beat mainstream developers to the punch. One of these was the original Vietcong, providing a starkly realistic and well-researched experience of Vietnam through the eyes of a Special Forces soldier. This overlooked pioneer was a bittersweet experience; offering immersive environments and plenty of equipment to choose from, but forgetting that players want more action and less beating around the bush.

Vietcong: Fist Alpha follows up as the official mission pack to the original game. Based around Sergeant Warren Douglas, a disgruntled career soldier, and featuring the same Special Forces men from Vietcong, Fist Alpha is set a few months before the events of the original game. The opening missions involve the patrolling we've seen countless times in Vietcong and the establishment of what would later become the Nui Pek Special Forces base. While not going as far as to re-use old levels, the game does predominately take place in the same region, giving veteran players another look at some of the same places and people who they encountered previously.

As with the original, most of the action in Fist Alpha is centred on small patrols and leading several Special Forces troops through the Vietnamese jungle. One of the major complaints of the original was that the game did not skip the long boring bits between combat zones, resulting in what was virtually a simulation of hours of boring treks through jungle, swamps and tunnels. Fist Alpha thankfully contains less walking, but there is still a significant amount of anticlimactic bushwalking scenes. The scenery is nice and all, but seriously, I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said 60% of the single player campaign consisted of walking around.

The gameplay is practically the same. While the player cannot directly control the squad, they can order individual members to their position, either to get the group back together or to get them to perform their special abilities, such as supplying ammunition or providing healing. Talking to the point-man will initiate the default patrol mode, which will guide the player at a snail's pace towards the next objective. Most players will probably get bored of walking and will sprint ahead, but the AI isn't responsive enough to follow suit, resulting in players mashing the numpad to get all the squad members back together.

Being labelled as merely a “mission pack”, there are no changes to the core gameplay. All the game modes are still around, including the Quick Match mode against AI opponents. Quick Match itself has been given more levels, and players can now control a squad of Vietcong with their own Vietnamese voice responses. The graphics are unchanged, featuring dense foliage but at the same time being a huge drain on frame rate. The sound effects are untouched, apart from the addition of Douglas's redneck voice.

One aspect of the game that has changed slightly is the inclusion of new weapons, such as the Skorpion submachine gun and the M14 automatic rifle. Fist Alpha also incorporates bayonets, which can be attached to several weapons and used to inflict heavy damage in close quarters at further range than the regular knife and allowing the player to fire their weapon when not stabbing and lunging.

While the series hasn't had much online support, the development of Fist Alpha has also brought many retroactive changes to Vietcong. The concurrent 1.6 patch for Vietcong integrates many of the features from Fist Alpha into the game, including bayonets. Vietcong players can play on Fist Alpha maps against FA players. They can even pick up and use FA-exclusive weapons, although they can never select the weapons from their menu. Multiplayer is still the same however, although the new weapons and maps add some much needed variety to the online experience.

Sadly, the developers don't seem to have learnt much from their previous outing. While Fist Alpha adds some nice features, the overall concept is still horrendously flawed. Walking for hours through the jungle is not fun, and small issues such as collision detection are still causing problems in the expansion. Players expecting new or innovative features will be sorely disappointed, and the new campaign missions are very short, but Fist Alpha is nonetheless worth collecting for the Vietnam shooter genre.

Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 9/10
Gameplay: 5/10
Replay: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/22/06