Here's my review of the game I've played so far, up to the start of the fifth level.


The third game in the Conflict series, this game follows four American soldiers during the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968 during the Vietnam war. The way you play the game changed significantly from open spaced desert to clastrophobic jungle, where hasty backpeddling and knives are often the order of the day. A rustling bush or voices down the track sometimes gives away the position of Vietcong guerrilas, but often a suprise attack has you fumbling to trying to gain control of the situation. Your team mates supply ample support, though sometimes their covering of positions leaves you frustrated. The setup is, however, similar to the two previous incarnations of Conflict, allowing you to switch any one of the four soldiers at any time. Using context-sensitive commands, you can control your team easily and effectively. The commands include the standard hold position/follow and hold fire/fire at will. The game then expands to more complicated orders, including healing downed team members, advancing to a specified position, protecting a friendly villager or soldier, and disarming booby-traps, a new addition to the series. These traps range from hidden pits, trip wire grenades and land mines, but are easily given away by the fact that they shine brightly. Your team can also assume control of vehicles, including a Huey helicopter, a patrol boat, a jeep and even a tank. Unfortunatly, your enemy also utilise armour, and taking it down is as difficult as it was in Desert Storm. Fortunately, the jungle setting means there's less of it to deal with. The jungle paths are fairly concrete like, but unlike another game boasting tarmac jungle walls (cough MOH:RS cough), there are several paths you can take. On the first mission out in the field, I found two completely different paths. One takes you directly through the jungle to your objective of freeing a village overrun with Viet Cong, the other takes you wading through a river. The two paths have completely different enemies and infastructure, a feature that very few games include. These paths are interspersed with the aforementioned villages, caves, trenches, temples, rivers and the odd town. Now, down to weaponry. Each man in your squad has a different primary speciality weapon, including the M3A1 SMG, the M14 sniper rifle, the M60 machine gun and the M16A1 rifle. You also can pick up any enemy weapon, plus grenades, rocket launchers, pistols, shotguns and grenade launchers. There's also a new skill point system, where points gained from mission statistics can be assigned to skills, including all the different classes of weapons, medics and defusing booby traps. There have also been big graphical improvements. Facial expressions are better, gameplay animations are improved, vegetation is good looking and there are very-well done CGI cutscenes, including some very foul-mouthed language using seemingly every word under the sun. This, and other reasons like detachable enemy limbs, spiked pit death and loads of body ketchup means the game's not exactly for everyone. Others may not like the occaisonly frustrating gameplay and the sometimes concrete linearity of the jungle. It's not top-notch graphically, but it more than does it's job. So, if you liked the first two Conflict games, or war and squad games generally, this is must-buy, and could convert you non war-gamers.

Graphics-8.7
Solid, if a little unspectacular. Better than the previous Conflicts though.

Sound-9.4
Excellent, potty-mouthed voice acting. Nice music and gunfire.

Gameplay-9.2
Varied, exciting and tense, sometimes frustrating though.

Lifespan-8-8.5
Should be a good 15-18 hours on Normal difficulty. Co-op excellent as well.

Overall- 9/10

Couldn't you do a proper review of that?

I mean going into Conflict: Vietnam's main profile page and near the top it's says write a user review. Do your review there but there isn't really a point now that you did one here. You have done it before with Splinter Cell and MOH: RS.

Oh yeah, I didn't know how to write a user review without there being a link on the main page.

Ah well, its a good review so let it be