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Conflict: Desert Storm

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: November 13, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Conflict: Desert Storm
Category: Stealth Action
Developer: Gotham Games
Publisher: SCi
Release Date: Released (Sept. 13, 2002)
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here

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Gotham Games has brought forth Conflict: Desert Storm for the Xbox, PC, and Playstation. Strange though it may seem to the untutored eye, the game covers the action of American and British special forces in the 1990-1991 Gulf War. You get to choose to control soldiers from either the SAS or Delta Force, shooting your way through missions extending from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 through the end of Iraqi resistance in March 1991. Or deathmatch over the Internet or LAN: it’s your call, really.

They fly through the air with the greatest of ease

Most missions see you commanding a team of four: a rifleman, a sniper, a heavy weapons expert, and a demolition expert. All of them can use any weapon, but each starts out with higher skills in his specialty. Skills are also the primary difference between the SAS and Delta Force: all SAS soldiers have a modicum of medical training, while the Delta Force combat engineer has a high degree of medical training but the other Delta Force operatives have none, instead gaining other low-level combat skills.

I told you not to light up in the gas station!

You can flip between all of these guys with a keypress (1 - 4) and have the others wait around or follow you like puppies. Set them to fire at will or hold until fired on, or even tell them where to go and where to look. Better still, your teammates are actually pretty good with their weapons and will chew through the enemy as fast as you can while keeping a decent eye on your flanks.

An SA-8 explodes: Part 1

Combine this with some nods towards realism—unlike Operation Flashpoint, Conflict: Desert Storm is aware that you can’t hurt a T-72 from the front with a LAW rocket—and spectacular explosion effects, and you’d think Conflict: Desert Storm would be set on a path to greatness. Unfortunately, somebody blew the support beams on the stairway to heaven.

An SA-8 explodes: Part 2

The control interface bears the distinctive imprint of a console port: it re-uses every key it can. Hold down alt, and re-use half your movement keys to give your squadmates commands. Hold down shift and roll your mousewheel to select items of your kit. It works reasonably well after you get used to it, except where it doesn’t work at all. For example, you’re supposed to be able to give items to other squadmates, but it never worked for me. This proved rather awkward when the slightly unpredictable nature of the Use/Pick Up button caused soldiers to pick up the wrong thing. That button’s finicky nature also created irritation when it proved difficult to find the exact, precise angle necessary to look at a button to push it without reloading my soldier’s weapon and thereby throwing away most of a magazine of ammo.

Hurry up - you'll miss the bus!

You move your soldier around in third person, and you can play the entire game in third person. It works, and I admit this despite a deep personal bias against playing in puppet-manipulation mode. I know this because the game refused to toggle into its first-person aim mode after the first time I ran through the training missions (even after a complete wipe and re-install.) This forced me to prove that you can win the game entirely from the third person. My only consolation was that movement in aim mode is extremely clumsy.

The skills screen for one of the soldiers

However, the mouse control is also buggered. Small mouse movements sometimes produce no movement, and sometimes lots. This has the highly frustrating result of sometimes making a given enemy impossible to aim at, and it makes movement unnecessarily clumsy. Adding insult to injury, your soldier sometimes sticks to the walls. Apparently the game is a massive hit on consoles, which suggests that either most console game controls are crap, or, more likely, the port job onto the PC was a rushed afterthought.

Lasing for a night airstrike

While Conflict: Desert Storm treats LAW fire against T-72s with some accuracy and soldiers can throw grenades a realistic distance, its accuracy elsewhere is somewhat suspect. A-10 strike aircraft apparently need laser-designation to attack a target with cannons, and the cannon fires when the plane is directly over the target! MLRS artillery strikes have a cool meteor-strike look, but affect an area perhaps two truck-lengths in diameter. The game’s description and the mission briefings tell you to be stealthy, but virtually anything you do, including crossing the wrong patch of ground, winds up triggering the enemy’s alarm system, so stealth isn’t really worth attempting. In the best tradition of console games, I suppose, waves of enemy soldiers will pop out of nowhere, even from areas you just physically cleared, or from spaces where they couldn’t have been packed with a trash masher.

TOW, check; .50, check; We're ready to go shopping!

Soldiers take damage on a hit bar, and medkits heal them back rapidly to full health. Moreover, if a soldier loses all his health, he begins to bleed out, producing a time in which another member of the team can use a medkit on him to bring him back into the fray. While unrealistic, the amazing medical advances thus represented actually produce two good gameplay dynamics. First, it forces you to run out and give first aid under fire, which feels suitably heroic when you know you have go walk out to a place where somebody just got whacked. Second, it provides a buffer around the fact that you only get two savegames per level, which is otherwise simply a pain in the ass. Console games make excuses about limited cartridge memory space being the cause of limited savegames. I’ve got gigabytes of space on my hard drive: let me use them if I want!

Group photo time, turn around please!

The frustrations of the interface destroy what would otherwise be a thoroughly entertaining arcade shooter. There were a number of points where Conflict: Desert Storm really was appealing and engaging: the baddies have gratifying death animations, some well-designed missions that required some thought and tactics to win, and the explosions are suitably gratifying. Then it would turn around and bite me with some quirk, leaving me more frustrated each time. A hard-core simulation it isn’t. A good soft-core shooter it could have been…but it isn’t.



Review System Specs:
  • CPU: 1666MHz Athlon
  • RAM: 256MB
  • Video: 64Mb Geforce3 Ti200


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