Vietcong: Purple Haze

"I wanna be your dog."

Originally the Vietcong games were going to stay PC-bound. Unfortunately for Xbox gamers the series has taken flight on home-consoles. Coyote (the new developer) has taken a good thing, has tried to make the experience engaging, but has created something much worse in the process. While the atmosphere generally feels in-place, Vietcong: Purple Haze comes up a little bit short of fresh gameplay elements, or anything fresh for that matter. What you're getting here is what Medal Of Honor would be like if it were an Arcade game. When looking for what went wrong from PC to Xbox I remembered something: The PC version of Purple Haze had nearly 40 missions, while the Xbox version had a measly 19.

I won't bore you with a list but there's a lot of things that are left to be desired in Vietcong, like-realism, tanks/planes, actual improvements, good transitioning from PC to Xbox, and well thought out maps that don't allow the player to be cheated. Stress-induced Baby Boomers will jam away at the controller trying to pilot their shameful Vietnamese, or American soldier through a fairly uneventful environment. The real problem here is that Vietcong is unidentifiable from the slew of other recent shooters which all take place beneath the dense brushes of a jungle, or in a generic rock cave. It just doesn't accentuate enough on the unique perspective a developer could've brought into a Vietnam-based game.

Sadly a huge dynamic in Vietcong's gameplay is it's team play. While this may have been a good thing (and may still be in some third-world countries) your teammates won't even fulfill their scripted duties. Your point man should be leading you through a level. Instead he glitches on a shrub and starts dancing with your Medic because Coyote couldn't possibly afford game-testers. The remarkable absence of all the awesome levels of the old lead to Vietcong: Purple Haze feeling half-assed, and incomplete.

Plagued by some sort of disease which requires sex with strange Vietnamese women, Coyote forgot to add true Multiplayer, and instead gave us a very stiff Xbox LIVE mode. While it's nice to see that everyone else in the world agrees with me that this game sucks, its unnecessary and doesn't add a whole lot of value. While not as sophisticated as Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six 3, you'll still have some intense memorable battles. Sure, the capture the flag mode may be great at first, until people realize that grenading one area effectively prevents any enemy from capturing their flags.

Graphically, Vietcong doesn't look horrendous, but does look like a PS2 launch title. Sure, everything looks fine, and the dense jungle looks semi-realistic, but that's what I've come to expect from Xbox. The characters all look odd and disproportioned, their movement also feel very sketchy. The way your character moves-it's like he's made of wood. Who knows with those Vietnamese soldiers, perhaps they are made out of wood.

Overall Vietcong isn't the best Vietnam game out there right now, but it offers enough to keep the average gamer satisfied for a couple weeks. What it lacks in original gameplay it makes up for with an awesome online mode. The music-choices are probably some of my favorites that have appeared on Xbox. Unfortunately the team-combat didn't work out as well as planned, and that being the base of the game kind of hurt any chances of economic success.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/04