Played on:
Windows
It seems all of a sudden that everyone is rushing to make a Vietnam-era first person shooter. Vietcong, which was done by Illusion Softworks and Pterodon, is only one of the titles that has either just come out or has been recently announced. 2015, creators of the Medal of Honor games, is now moving onto Vietnam with the just-announced Men of Valor. On top of that, another FPS was just released, called Line of Sight: Vietnam. That game focuses on sniping your enemies rather than Vietcong's squad-based open combat.
So what's with all the Vietnam games? Well, there have been a couple of attempts over the years (like this one), but war-based FPS games were pretty much all terrible up until a couple of years ago. Computers are now powerful enough to draw a decent-looking jungle environment while juggling a dozen or more AI characters - I'd say that a good Vietnam FPS is long overdue. So is Vietcong actually any good? Well, let's take a look.
Vietcong uses a custom engine written by Pterodon which I don't think I have ever seen before in action. The game doesn't make use of any great whiz-bang features like pixel shaders or DirectX 9 effects, but it does push a lot of polygons and it runs pretty well overall. The lighting in this engine also works pretty nicely, as a few of the night missions in Vietcong will show you.
Generally, this engine almost seems to have been written mainly for this game, as it plays specifically towards what is needed in a Vietnam game - lots of varieties of trees and lots of polygons to support the environment, your enemies, and your own squad.
Vietcong does make use of a pretty large number of keys on your keyboard, but this game does have a lot of items to play around with. Even then, some of the keys can be condensed down into menus - for example, you have access to glow sticks and medkits, but they can be used directly from your mouse-wheel weapon menu. This is a handy addition, and works well when you have long-forgotten the key for some random item you suddenly need.
All of the standard controls and associated options are present, along with a good key setup system. Going prone is here, and it of course helps your accuracy - quite a bit. Any weapon can be aimed with an "aim" key (similar to an alt-fire), which helps some weapons a lot more than others. One minor complaint is that I wish they would put all the multiplayer-only key bindings on their own separate page - I had to look at the description for every key to see if I needed to keep it handy during the single-player game. Still, not a big deal.
Your buddies who accompany you on a majority of missions can take orders as well, all of which are available from a menu. Hotkeys are set up for calling any specific guy to your side immediately, and you will need to interact with your men often to get through some missions.
The game does make a valiant effort to look realistic - and while the gameplay is far from realistic, it does look great. There are a lot of little details to enjoy, like the stuff you build up in your personal bunker after completing missions. It feels like home, sort of.
The environments look great for the most part, and they make up probably the best-looking jungle environment in a game that I've seen yet. Even though you spend a majority of your time out in the jungle, the developers have managed to make each level unique in at least a few ways - and many of these unique landmarks become a focal point of your mission.
The models for your squad aren't too bad, but as is what is becoming a standard nowadays, they look terrible when they talk. Watching mission briefings is rather painful, as your captain and your character, Hawkins, show lots of teeth and just look extremely unnatural while talking. Enemies aren't quite as detailed as the guys on your own squad, but that is done mainly to keep memory usage down as well as keep performance up during firefights. They still are somewhat varied as you go, with different sets of clothing, hats, and quite a few faces. But that's about all the variety there is. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing a woman or child in this game - not once.
There are a ton of weapons to use in Vietcong, most of which look pretty good - simply because they look "used". Many games show off shiny, never-been-used weapons that just look completely out of place in war, but this one doesn't do that.
Most of the animations look pretty good, although the game doesn't really do any of the ragdoll physics effects that is becoming standard fare. Since you will be spending at least a bit of time ransacking enemy bodies for ammo, weapons, and intelligence items, it becomes at least a bit of a sore point.
Vietcong offers up a pretty extensive single player campaign where your character, Hawkins, leads a squad consisting of upto five other guys through a range of missions. These missions are pretty varied, but you can expect that basically every one of them will having you kill lots of Vietcong. The mission goals are fairly forgiving in how you should accomplish them, but every once in a while you will have no clue what to do and checking the goals won't help at all. You do get a map you can look at, but in a couple of missions it is either useless or just downright misleading. A few times I had to run around for a while to figure out what to do.
