That's the theory anyway, and missions can effectively be looked upon as extended lateral-thinking puzzles, which can be solved through the shrewd application of military strategy. Of course, what really happens is that you go piling in, get torn to shreds by rampant insurgents, swear a lot and try again. For all its strategic pretensions, much of the threat can't be accounted for, as enemies appear in areas that have previously been deemed clear. Get caught in the open and it's usually curtains, as the interface simply doesn't allow for split-second reactions.
Adapted from the console game, it's a largely inelegant affair that requires you to place a series of pointers where you want your soldiers to move to. Given the paraphernalia of the battlefield, simply moving the pointers to the right place can be a chore in itself, and you're often grappling with the interface as much as the challenges of the particular mission, with panic setting in as you attempt to move your boys to safety.
Further complications have been added with the ability to split each unit into buddy-teams of two, and even briefly control individual soldiers, but ultimately making it more complex doesn't make it any more intuitive.
Cumbersome though it can sometimes be, it's still extremely involving, and you'll find yourself attempting missions numerous times until you get it right, often through a case of trial and error; simply remembering where the enemies are going to come from and reacting accordingly. And thankfully, the elaborate save-game procedure of the last game has been dispatched in favour of a more traditional checkpoint system. Even so, you cover the same ground several times.
What's more, while the missions are fairly lengthy affairs already, they become even more laborious if you get a soldier injured, as you have to drag him - sometimes literally - back to a CasEvac casualty evacuation area for treatment. To its credit the game doesn't shirk from the horrors of conflict and the soldiers even show a modicum of remorse when civilians are mown down in the crossfire. And unlike some games, you can inadvertently decimate your own squad with a case of 'friendly' fire.
There's still a bit of Hollywood thrown in for good measure though, and when one of your team takes a fatal hit, it's shown in spectacular slow-motion as his innards are spilled onto a foreign street. Mention must also be made of the music, which adds to the tension, kicking in dramatically in the heat of the battle. In fact, sometimes the only way you know you're under fire is when the music speeds up.
Elsewhere, there's been a vague attempt to imbue the individual soldiers with a personality, presumably in the hope that you'll forge some kind of protective bond with them and be deeply upset when they buy the farm.
This never happens though, and they're little more than hapless grunts sent to die at your whim, thousands of miles from home. In their defence, they do swear like f Whether moaning about their wounds - "My f There's even some impromptu rhyming, such as the touching couplet: "Alpha team, lean and mean, taking out Muhajadeen Other conversational snippets cover such topics as rap music, spinal injuries and the fact that the dying soldier slumped over his team-mate's shoulders has been eating too many kebabs.
This is about as far as the humour goes though, and it's fair to say that Ten Hammers is as serious as cancer. The antithesis of brightly coloured faraway lands often depicted in games, the word 'game' doesn't readily apply - it's based on a military simulator after all.
As joyless as it is, Ten Hammers does begin to suck you in, and you do occasionally find yourself thinking like a soldier, avoiding open space, applying suppressing fire, covering your mate's back and whooping like an idiot when you blow up some foreigners.
That said, without the constant instructions, you wouldn't have a clue what to do. With patience, it can be an engrossing experience, as you tentatively eke your way through a foreign town, with deadly threats lurking round every comer.
It's dramatic, it's tense, it's infuriating, but is it fun? It's not fun, it's war. We were promised new player-controlled mechanised units.
What the developer meant was that you could get behind the levers of a tank and blow great big f Yep, when the story deems appropriate, you'll briefly be put in charge of a heavily-armed vehicle and given free reign to terminate with extreme prejudice. It's one of the few moments of the game where you actually enjoy yourself. After hours of skulking around by proxy, to actually be in direct control of a large weapon is a rare joy.
Originally We Planned to write this hands-on while sipping away at the premium-strength cider Three Hammers that Will found in his local CostCutters last month, hopefully producing four-pages of dangerously honest beliefs about supposed weapons of mass destruction, openly derisory comments about George Bush and an anecdote about Saddam, a leper and a sausage which we believed to be funny at the time.
Eventually, we planned, it would descend into a paragraph-straddling drunken slur against misplaced morals, asinine politics and dubious ethics, bereft of spelling and grammar and punctuated by random mentions of the game I'm supposed to be playing, no doubt inserted by a frustrated editor while I nurse a hangover that could level a hippo.
Maybe it was fortunate then that as I raised the apple-scented paint-stripper to my lips I was immediately stabbed by about 12 icy glares from various official types around the office. Apparently it's frowned upon to get supremely hammered in the workplace, and so I have to write about Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers while sober.
Honestly, the things I have to put up with. You no doubt remember Full Spectrum Warrior as the squad-based strategic shooter that while making a pretty decent impact on PC, was always an Xbox classic first and foremost Set in modern-day combat scenarios a made-up Middle-Eastern town in a made-up Middle-Eastern country , the original game placed you in command of a squad of four troops who must liberate the residents of the fictitious dictatorship in a hail of gunfire and patriotic shouting.
The twist was that you don't directly control any of your men, instead you give orders, set firing sectors, apply suppressing fire, covering fire, chuck grenades about and generally get the job done. Later levels, meanwhile, saw you controlling more than one squad, allowing you to employ complex flanking manoeuvres to outwit and outgun the enemy. That was the gist of FSW -manoeuvre, flank, neutralise and move on.
Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Topics xbox , og xbox , microsoft xbox , redump , redump. This Original Xbox game matches redump. There are no reviews yet. During most of the missions, you're in control of two distinct fireteams, each comprised of four members, which can move and act independently of each other.
You don't directly move them around; you issue them orders by means of a context-sensitive cursor. An element on your HUD will reveal what formations that your fireteams will take when they reach the spot that your cursor has highlighted, which is invaluable when determining whether any given piece of cover is viable.
Much of the gameplay revolves around this sort of movement -- "bounding," it's called, and it involves alternately moving your fireteams to and from spots that will provide them sufficient coverage from enemy fire. In Ten Hammers, just like in its predecessor, you get the feeling that every move counts, and as such, even covering the smallest bit of ground demands your full attention. As mentioned before, a number of refinements have been added to the control mechanics, and at times, these do make it easier to execute more complex tactical maneuvers.
Primarily, it is now possible to give cross-team commands; e. Similarly, you are also able to temporarily divide one of your fireteams into two distinct subteams, in order so that, say, Alpha can execute a flanking maneuver without having to tie up Bravo. You sacrifice raw firepower by doing this not to mention degree coverage , but you gain a good deal of flexibility.
Another welcome change is "hot movement. As the name implies, this helps a good deal when you have to move through "hot" locations, and even more so when you've set a fallback location for your team, if things happen to get ugly. Of course, you can count on things getting ugly. Your enemies haven't changed a great deal in terms of make and model. They're most often insurgents from Zekistan, the fictional Middle Eastern country where the game takes place, and if you're harboring memories of the comparatively dense enemies you encountered in the first game, it's in your interest to banish those thoughts.
Rare is the enemy that stays put behind destructible cover, unless it's a viable tactical option. More often than not, your foes will perform strategic retreats, lay down suppressive fire, and flank you when you least expect them to.
The game is a lot harder as a result. To even the odds, you have a few extra toys at your disposal. Many of the missions will grant you access to some very heavy artillery in the form of Bradley fighting vehicles. When in control of these, hordes of insurgents that would have otherwise grounded your fireteams go down like mallards to buckshot. Unless said insurgents have technicals of their own on the field, in which case it's business as usual: Take it slow, or you're dead.
You also can also ply some tricks on the fireteam level; remember the grenade launcher mechanics from the first game, which allowed you to manually aim shots?
Well, those are back, along with a similar feature that lets riflemen and team leaders snipe enemies that are behind heavy cover.
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