Conflict: Vietnam

"A Solid effort by SCI, but gameplay really killed any potential"

It seems every war on earth has a game created about it, and Vietnam is no exception. The latest Vietnam War title is Conflict: Vietnam, developed by SCI Games. You can tell the developer worked hard on this game, it's the little things that make this obvious. At the base the game kinda plays like an RPG in the sense that you can walk around and talk to people. Some just tell you to carry on with your orders, or make some generic small talk comment; others will give you little quests like taking a bottle of liquor to a captain. If you do the "side quest" so to speak, you are rewarded with an item, special grenades for example. These bonus objectives appear quite frequently through the missions as well. As you wonder the base, you can hear other soldiers conversing with each other as you pass, which is pretty cool. Like I said, you can tell SCI really put a lot of effort into this title.

Graphics-6
The graphic is Conflict: Vietnam fall in between average and great. Things look the way they are supposed to, which is fine by me because graphics aren't super important. I'd rather a game be really fun and look like crap then be pretty and suck. The only real flaw I can think of is the bullets. They look like little yellow lines slowly traveling towards your opponent.

Sound-6
The game scores average in this category as well. Things sound the way they should, but nothing will stick out in your mind. The game has licensed music, "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane "Nowhere to Run" by Martha Reeves and the Vendellas, and "Goin' up The Country" by Canned Heat.

Control-5
Basically your standard shooter controls, but some things get a little awkward. Pressing your mouse wheel opens your inventory, and scrolling it switches the team member you are controlling. I often get the two mixed up and end up switching to a different guy then grabbing the health pack I was after. Giving your teammates commands is a bit of a headache. Simple commands are easy to execute, the V button tells them to hold or to follow, but it's the complex commands that are complex to execute. Say you want a guy to "go over there" or protect a vehicle. You have to hit spacebar to change your view, right click and press V and F1-F4. (I forget the actual commands, but it's equally awkward). What ever happened to hitting tab and 1-5?

Gameplay-6
I'm not sure what to say about the gameplay other then it's not fun. It's not spectacular or all that awful, it's just not a fun game to play. Gameplay is the meat of a game. Everything else can be top notch, but if the gameplay sucks everything else was done in vain. It was almost like a chore for me to get through enough of the game to do this review. The gameplay suffers from the bad controls mentioned above. You'll want to do something, and you'll find you'll have to stop and pause for a second to remember how to pull off the command. I don't know if firearm technology sucked in 1968 or not, but trying to hit something that's not two feet in front of you is hard to do. Also, the zoom on the sniper sways too much to be of any use. I know absolutely nothing about the Vietnam War, but a lot of the opposition is hard to see in the jungle. That's probably not the games fault though; I hear that war was hard to fight because of the jungle atmosphere.

Story-9
I loved this story. This is another way SCI shows how much effort they put into this thing. Most war games based on real world conflicts use their historical accuracy and recreation of missions to tell the war story, but this game goes beyond that. Each character has their own little tale to tell, and you get to see a relationship form between the squad members you control. I'm not going to get into details, because I believe you're better off seeing this for yourself, but let's just say as good as Call of Duty was, it would have been a bit better if Infinity took this page from SCI's development playbook. I actually downloaded Bink video tools and joined all the video files into one big movie, encoded it to avi, and watched it like a real movie. It was great.

Overall-6
The developer gets an A for effort. This game would have gotten a 4.5 or 5 if I didn't like the story so much. But by all means, give this game a try. Reviews are just opinions. There have been games that got bashed in the reviews that I ended up loving, so get the demo and see for yourself. You may like it. This is by no means a bad game, I just found the gameplay suffered and it wasn't fun to play. Everything else was good enough to make me happy.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/10/04