You have to lead your team into missions, because no-one else will, and generally success is down to your single-handed ingenuity and skill in combat. What the game does do well is make you feel like a hero, although the voiceovers make you want to slit your own throat. Why are we paying money to stare at a black screen with a crosshairs on it? Dramatic tension? If only.
This contrasts horrendously with the tunnel missions, which are dull beyond belief, pitch-black, and deeply unfulfilling.
Ducking under logs as horrendous amounts of bullets fly to and fro, popping up and laying down covering fire is about as much fun as you can have in an FPS. These are the most exciting missions the game has to offer, with a frenetic pace, and excellent use of the jungle cover. The missions themselves are pleasantly varied, from base defence and attacks, to taking out snipers, tunnel combat, helicopter gun-operation missions, and all-out jungle firefights. They can't complete the mission without you - at least that much is left to you - but they can take withering amounts of gunfire from the enemy with nothing more than a witty comeback and a sneer. And you don't necessarily need to, since each and every one of them seems almost totally invulnerable to damage. You go through each level with your squad of team-mates, each with their own speciality, but your control over them is limited to hold and attack commands - there's really very little you can do to affect their progress. The game is labelled as a tactical shooter, but that's a bit of a misnomer, as there's not really all that much in it worthy of the label "tactical". This would be fine, if the enemy weren't painted unambiguously as the bad guys, and if your comrades didn't go through the game screaming racist obscenities at the enemy whilst gunning them down and whooping a lot.īut lo and verily, this is, after all a game, so perhaps it's best to consider it just as that. Pterodon has attempted to avoid any politically oriented criticism by not reproducing any of the grunt ground-troop conflicts of the war, instead concentrating on the role of the US special forces, who wouldn't have done anything naughty. This, after all is the videogames industry, the world of Who Frags Wins, and deep thought was never much of a raison d'etre for best selling titles. So as with the movie industry, perhaps a digital recreation of the conflict should either take a political stance, try to teach us something, or perhaps represent both sides of the war as fairly as possible? Y'know, butchery, pillage and the like, stuff you're definitely not getting a Care Bear hug for. Pretty much everyone agrees that the Vietnam war was in principle, a Bad Thing (tm), where lots of people did lots of things that frankly, they shouldn't have. It'd be damn near impossible to address a game like Vietcong without considering whether it should ever have been made in the first place.
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