Conflict: Desert Storm

Made it to the extraction point, but it looks like Foley aint coming home.

Sand all around, as far as the eye can see. This country is arid, blasted; other than the occasional goat, nothing lives in this bleak, inhospitable land. The heat is overpowering; relentlessly hammering down for sixteen out of every twenty-four hours. The three men by my side were rank newbies just three missions ago. Now they're a well-oiled, autonomous force - covering my back and seeking their own targets. Somewhere out there in the sand the enemy await in their hundreds. We have a sandstorm blowing in from the north, possible locations for three scud launchers, and only forty-five minutes left till zero hour. Better get cracking.

This is the atmosphere, which weighs heavily on every session of Conflict: Desert Storm you're likely to play. With the odds stacked against you and your team of soldiers, you must take on the might of Saddam's army over a fifteen-mission campaign. Facing a foe that only knows the inhospitable desert, you are outnumbered and outgunned and in a claustrophobic and essentially alien environment. The only way out of this is with your wits.

Welcome to the... erm... Desert

Watch out for that sandstorm - it'll make everything look..... brown.

Conflict: Desert Storm is now in its third iteration. Originally released on Xbox and PS2, Desert Storm failed to make much of an impression on the charts, although it did build a substantial cult following for itself. Essentially a third person squad based RTS, Desert Storm was renowned for its realism and uncompromising gameplay.

This release for the GameCube is a welcome addition to a catalogue lacking in tactical military games. The player takes control of a squad of up to four specialists; an all-round soldier, a demolition expert, a sniper, and a heavy weapons expert. The player can directly control any one of these at any time, and can issue orders to the others both individually and collectively. At the end of each mission, points are awarded which can then be "spent" on improving the skills of team members. As a result, losing a soldier in the later missions is a bad thing. A newbie is no substitute for an experience squad member.

Getting on the move

Erm, Foley? That's one of our helicopters, right?

Desert Storm is set in the first Gulf War, in the early nineties, and each of the missions is based around real world events. Each mission opens with a detailed briefing, covering historical information that provides the "Big Picture" as well as more detailed fictional information on the specifics of your task. These missions range from lightning-strike rescues to infiltration and sabotage, with a spot of mass damage-dealing thrown in for good measure.

At your disposal in these missions is a full range of military hardware. Your squad has the ability to go hand to hand with knives, fire fight with automatic rifles, call in air strikes, indulge in some hardcore demolition with C4, and everything in between. All of the hardware in the game behaves exactly as it would in real life - for example, don't even think of taking out a tank with a portable rocket launcher unless you know you're targeting the weak spot in the armour. As with real life, the enemies in Desert Storm will give no quarter - if you mess it up, they'll shoot you.

Getting out of trouble

Woohoo! You get to blow stuff up!

You're going to need an escape plan. Trust me on this. Planning is the key word in Desert Storm. The first few minutes of the mission are spent studying your map, planning goal-reaching tactics and looking for any potential problems. But getting to the goal is only half of the problem. In a few missions, the extraction point is straightforward to reach from the mission goal, but in the majority of them it's imperative that you have enough resources to get from the goal to the extraction point and, in some cases, even perform some unsupplied missions afterwards. Unlike Doom, you're not going to find weapons and med kits lying under bushes in Iraq. You may get lucky at the occasional military camp, but you're going to have to deal with the personnel first.

You get the picture? This isn't Unreal. If you run in with both guns blazing, you'll last for about thirty seconds (on a good day). Desert Storm requires wits, patience, and the ability to think around corners. It's not all cerebral, though - there's a good whack of shooting and blowing things up in there, but you have to survive long enough to get to the things you blow up.

Trials and Tribulations

Would you trust these men with loaded weapons? Thought not....

Graphically, Conflict: Desert Storm does the job very well. Alright, so it's brown. No, really, I mean brown. You're in the desert. In camouflage. And so is everyone else. Desert Storm makes Quake look like an explosion in a rainbow factory. Brown-ness aside (you can always don the night-vision goggles to get a spot of green in your life), I don't think I've ever seen such an immersive representation of one of Earth's most hostile environments. There's no heat ripple, but the colours themselves scream suffocation at you. The models are detailed and move believably.

The sound is also impressive, particularly in surround. Bullets whizz around you and explosions are satisfyingly plump. An option to play as either an American or British unit is a beautiful addition - let's face it, you're going to be spending a lot of time with these guys; giving them an accent you doesn't drive you up the wall is a nice feature. The music, largely orchestral brass and percussion, suits the game well and never becomes intrusive.

The controls are smooth, responsive and clear. There are a lot of functions mapped onto the GameCube's little pad, but at no time do they become confusing. It's very easy to order your sniper to a particular vantage point, tell your heavy weapons guy to lay down covering fire, while planting explosives yourself.

Blood and Guts

A multiplayer mode allows cooperative play of the entire game with up to four players.

It's in the AI, however, that Desert Storm really delivers. Your supporting team really does work with you - finding safe paths to reach waypoints you set, without running across open ground; giving accurate covering fire; and alerting you to enemy presence you may have missed. And they never get stuck in doorways. The enemy AI is equally impressive. Although they may occasionally charge at you with guns blazing, it only happens when no other cover is available and when you're outnumbered. The same AI is applied to vehicles such as helicopters and tanks - the tanks in particular will move to a vantage point where they have you in range if they get a hint of your presence.

How do you feel about the colour brown? You'd better get used to it.

Conflict: Desert Storm is a vivid depiction of modern warfare. The desert environment quickly becomes oppressive and there really isn't any variety in the colours used onscreen, but realism is the order of the day here. There isn't much red in Desert Storm because there generally aren't many red things in the desert. The first time a sandstorm blows in and you're lost in a brown haze, the realism of the game kicks in. This isn't real war, but it's as close as you'll get from your armchair.