Operation: Vietnam review (DS)

This is a budget title, so it could be considered a little unfair to go at it with guns blazing. However, when dealing with something so impressively mediocre, I’m not inclined to take prisoners. This is modern retro gaming and feels like something off the Amiga 500. Even back then, however, Operation: Vietnam would have been recognised for its flawed, frustrating gameplay.

Squad! Ten-hut!

The game has you in charge of four cliché-spouting stereotypes who have been lost in the jungles of Vietnam. You have a commander type with a decent gun, a medic with a pea-shooter, a grizzled and grumpy guy with a bazooka/rocket launcher thing, and a sniper who isn’t as much fun as snipers usually are. The first mission sees you playing as the commander. Rescue the other members of the team and you’re off.

You view the action in top down 90s isometric style, and you control the squad using the d-pad. Not the stylus. The d-pad. Unfortunately, your battle hardened veterans seems to be walking through thick swamps the whole time judging by how slowly they seem to move. Enemies do unreasonable things like shoot at you on the diagonal, which the controls seem unwilling to recognise, leaving your crack squad of bullet magnets spinning around uselessly as you try to hit something other than trees.

I Work Alone

This is supposed to be a squad-based, slightly strategic game thingy, but you’ll quickly find that you lose fewer guys (and therefore have to restart levels less often) by dumping everyone else at the beginning and running ahead with the sniper to clear out the bad guys. That’s when you’re not having the squad split up into two bits to presumably stop you finishing the game more quickly. Along the same lines, the fact that when one of your guys dies you go back to the beginning of the level (unless you’re in one of the dull boss battles), artificially extends the life of this game. Only it doesn’t, as your frustration levels will soar and the game will be thrown into a pit lined with punji sticks.

Part of the reason for leaving everyone else behind is that, when not under your direct control, your squad demonstrates all the self-preservation skills of the Northern Rock bank. They troop along behind you in single file, waiting an age before following you when you first set off, by which time they’ve been shot to bloody ribbons. When firing on their own initiative, the only surprise you’ll feel is over the fact that they didn’t shoot themselves or each other, so inept are they at hitting the enemy. Fortunately, friendly fire isn’t a problem. Well, it is, as you can’t gun your squad mates down and troop out of the jungle on your own.

Unfair

I’m probably being a little harsh, you might think, to compare this to Phantom Hourglass. However, that was the game I played before this one, and it was a stellar example of how to use the DS controls. Operation: Vietnam uses the touch screen to ‘issue orders’ to your squad, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else (including some of the touch screen commands) are done on the buttons. When you first start playing, you’ll wish the developers had spent more time maybe, I dunno, developing the game for the intended console. After a while of playing Operation: Vietnam, you’ll wish the development time had spent more time maybe, I dunno, doing anything else but making this. After a day or so of playing this, you’ll stab your own eyes out with the aforementioned punji sticks to avoid ever playing it again.

There are 10 basic levels, plus a bunch of challenge-style bonus levels that can be unlocked if you can bear the plodding, outdated gameplay, unresponsive controls, uninteresting graphics, and average sound. Otherwise, frustration and boredom are likely to see Operation: Vietnam being traded in very quickly indeed.