Conflict: Desert Storm II review

Blow it up!

Sand. A single grain of it is approximately 64,000 times bigger than one of your body cells and it can be a bugger to get out of your ear after a day out at the beach. Other than that, it is pretty unremarkable. You can build pretty sandcastles out of it and wise men don't build houses on it - but other than that you wouldn't think twice about the yellow stuff. So it's a case of 'hats off' to developers Pivotal Games - they have managed to create two games based around 'beach pepper'. Conflict: Desert Storm was one of last year’s most popular games and with good reason. It was spankingly great.

Bush Declares War on Ee-raq

Damn, lost me night vision goggles

With Conflict: Desert Storm, Pivotal managed to create the first game that successfully mixed elements of tactical squad shooters like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon with an entertaining and more arcadey experience. There were no 'one shot kills' from enemy soldiers and you could heal downed teammates as well.

Set during the Gulf War back in 1990, this game requires little explanation. Take control of a squad of four Special Forces (either US Delta Force or British SAS) soldiers and use them to complete missions in the Iraqi Gulf. You can swap between each team member with great ease and you can even issue basic commands for your squadies to follow. You can get them to follow you around, stand guard and even go to a specific location. So if you want your sniper to crouch down at the top of a hill and have your machine gun armed mates follow you then you can. You can even give them the go ahead to shoot anything that moves and doesn't speak English.

Your main mission objectives are given to you before the mission starts. These tend to be things like blowing up tanks, rescuing trapped troops or taking out a mortar team. You will often be issued new objectives as you progress through a mission as well, so make sure you don't waste all your ammo...!

Unlike the first game, the soldiers you start out with must last you the whole game. Lose a squad member and it is game over. This doesn't make the game any harder though, because Pivotal realised that most players who lost a soldier in the first game would simply go back to their last game save and try again anyway. As you progress through the missions your soldiers will earn experience and improve their skills depending on what you have had them doing. If one soldier has been reviving his teammates a lot then you can expect his medic skills to improve.

Ransack the Place

Just blow everything up. It's so much more interesting that way.

Exploration can often reap rewards for your team. Searching a building will often reveal extra weapons, ammo and med packs. This can often leave you wondering exactly who should get the AK47, who gets the rocket launchers and who gets to carry the lipstick. Luckily, you can swap items between team members whenever you like so lumping everything into one backpack is a viable option for the impatient.

The game’s artist obviously got a new set of felt tip pens this time around, as it all looks quite a bit better than the first game. Buildings tend to have more detail and so do your teammates. Colours are nicer and it all looks a bit sharper and clearer as well. Cut scenes look far more polished, though they still aren't the most well directed pieces of cinema on the planet. It seems that the programmers got the latest edition of 'Coding for Beginners' though because the framerate has been much improved over the first game. There are still moments of slowdown in some scenes, but it is not as prolific as it was in the first game.

I don't think that the sound guy is well liked though, as he didn't get a new pair of headphones this time around. As in the first game, the sound effects aren't the greatest I have ever heard. Gunfire seems a bit 'fake' and blowing up a tank sounds more like a controlled explosion in a garden shed than the twisting scream of rendered metal it should be.

Remember that I said you can choose between US and British soldiers? Well, they all have their own voices! I am going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that the programmers used their own voices for the soldiers because they are phenomenally bad! I don't really mean that in a nasty way, as it is rather amusing to hear your Yorkshire colleague berating Iraqi soldiers. The Yank voices are the worst, though. It's been thirty years since Dick Van Dyke horrified the London population with his 'cock-er-ney' accent in Mary Poppins, but revenge is sweet. Ha!

Do it Again, but with feeling

If only real wars were as much fun as virtual ones

There is not a huge amount of difference between this game and the first one. Sure, you have better graphics and your men move around better than before but it is more of the same in most cases. About the only new 'thing' is the ability to roll around whilst crouched down, which will often come in handy.

The setting this time around is far more urban than before and it makes a nice change from the usual expansive desert from the first game. There are also a couple of new vehicles for you to trundle around in, along with more heavy gun emplacements for you to tear enemy troops apart with. Annoyingly there are only ten missions, though they are a fair bit harder this time around. For some reason I didn't use the first-person view as much as I did before and tended to stick with the main third-person view. This may well be because the auto-targeting feature felt a bit better and you can switch from one target to the next with the shoulder buttons.

So, not a huge departure from what went on before then. This isn't really a bad thing as the first game was very good, though if a third game is going to be made it would be disappointing if they didn't add something extra. And as Bill Clinton realised, doing the same thing with the same people all the time can get boring.