Fighting your way back to the giant, circular, high ground at the centre of the US military compound is all great scripted fun, with VC leaping into your trenches left right and centre and providing some neat surprises. My favourite moment, however, came with the start of the Tet offensive the point at which the facility you've been pottering about in and doing your training is suddenly invaded by hordes of North Vietnamese trouble-makers. A seemingly obedient village, for example, luring you in before suddenly sprouting snipers and rampaging militia intent on gunning you down.
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My dalliance with the preview code started off with a lot of huffing and puffing on my part (perhaps because I felt that Conflict's spiritual home was located a lot closer to my living room floor than my office-bound gaming powerhouse) but some of the situations that the game threw at me really started to reel me in.
You'll be venturing along jungle trails, through ramshackle villages, among the ruins of ancient temples and down into VC tunnels and trenches - with your escapades being punctuated by some excellently designed set pieces. There's occasionally more than one path to follow (a hidden track path or a creek that you can wade through might be discovered and provide a parallel route towards the level's main focus), but otherwise action proceeds in a pretty linear fashion. Explosions are satisfyingly meaty though, never straying too far towards Hollywood extravagance, and the impression of dense jungle is certainly conveyed - even if the game doesn't allow you to run around willy-nilly as other jungle shooters do. The results are fairly satisfactory, although it's true to say that there's nothing on offer here that gets even close to the jungles we've seen in Far Cry or even Battlefield: Vietnam - we should perhaps bear in mind that this is a simultaneous console release so the visuals were never likely to set your graphics card alight.
The biggest challenge for Pivotal must have been using a retooled Conflict engine and jamming the Deserf Storm experience (where there's a lot of sand and no trees) into Vietnam (where there are a lot of trees and no sand). The game is now more attuned to realise that you're unlikely to send Cherry the medic to heal a grumpy Vietcong sniper, and so saves you some fiddly tapping by automatically knowing that you want to deliver bloody death - so bloody death comes a lot more swiftly. A mere depression of the right mouse button, a selection of a squad member and a look in the right direction will do the majority of your dirty work. The command system itself has been pretty streamlined since Conflict's Iraqi efforts and there's a lot less keyboard tapping.
Aimed to land somewhere between the painstaking command structure of games like Rainbow Six and the stand by that burning car and pull the trigger' approach of EA's fun-packed Freedom Fighters, this Conflict epistle allows you to switch between the roles of heavy gunner, sniper, light gunner and medic while issuing all manner of snipe that chap', heal that soldier', blow up that gun emplacement' orders. In an extensive play of some early code, we became thoroughly embroiled in the game's tale of four Vietnam stereotypes trapped behind enemy lines: the green rookie, the had-enough-of-this-shit veteran, the hick and the black guy, fighting their way through the undergrowth in the knowledge that the raging Tet offensive has cut off the chances of any airlift rescue.