Close Combat: First to Fight (Page 2): PC Game Reviews


	Platform PC Genre FPS Developer Destineer Publisher 2K Games ESRB Mature Released April 2005

- Good balance of tactics and action - Control scheme is well laid out - Unit AI is good - Co-op mode

- Same areas repeated - Short campaign - Not enough unique personality

Review: Call of Duty (PC) Review: Ghost Recon (PC) Review: Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (PC)
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You are not alone in First to Fight though, and you do have three other marines with you at all times. If one of your marines is incapacitated, you do not get a replacement soldier until you complete the mission. As such, it is in your best interest to try and keep your team alive. The orders you can issue are fairly simple. You can tell your marines to go to a specific location using the Go To command, you can order them to cover a specific area or direction, and you can order them to lay down suppressing fire. The control scheme is well thought out and the commands can be issued without much difficulty. Your team AI is quite good as well, since they have been preprogrammed with the marine tactics outlined in the tutorials. Your marines will cover each other and will engage the enemy without being told to do so, or to look for your enemies in a specific location. I found that when my marines where killed or mowed down, it was usually due to my poor leadership, which is the way that a game such as this should be. After all, this game is based on a training tool where people are being trained to make decisions which will keep other people alive.

The enemy AI on the other hand while not bad is fairly ordinary and does not pose much of a challenge. The level design is fairly linear, and the levels seem to blend into one another as areas are revisited. This linear level design doesn't offer too much opportunity for your enemies to attempt to flank your position, however where possible in some of the more unique areas, the enemy AI did show some

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flashes of excellence by attempting to compromise your cover. At other times however, your enemies simply stand still and allow you to snipe their position. For instance, in most cases, if you can obtain a safe firing position on an enemy machine gun nest, or mounted gun you can simply snipe the enemy manning that position, over and over, as a new enemy comes to man the gun after each enemy you take out without first attempting to return fire.

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After a while, the game loses a bit of its lustre but luckily the single player campaign is just long enough to hold your interest throughout. There are some nice touches added to the game such as the ability to pick up enemy weapons and use them, the ability to use mounted gun emplacements, and the awarding of medals at the end of each mission. For a couple of the ideas such as your team psychology and the awarding of medals, I would have liked to see how these ideas could have been made to have more of an effect on the actual gameplay. For instance, maybe after more medals awarded, you would get to lead more men, or your mission path would take a different turn, or you would be allowed to issue different more complex orders. Also, during the mission you can check on your squadmates by hovering your targeting reticule over them. This tells you their health, their morale, and their discipline. While certain actions can affect each of these, I would have liked to have had more of an indicator of your team's morale and discipline by their chatter, or some other indication. While the manual says that giving your team poor orders, or having team member incapacitated can negatively affect their morale, I did not really feel the effect of this when playing through the game.

The production values of the game were perfectly acceptable but not on the same level of flashiness of the current cream of the crop. The cut scenes are all done in-engine but at very low resolutions. Also, the audio is a little bit plain, and the Arabic chatter is a little repetitive. The graphics though I found to be quite crisp and clean. The environmental textures and variety leave something to be desired, but the character models and detail were very good. Overall the production values don't really add much to the experience, but nor do they take away anything from the gameplay. Multiplayer is included, and the co-operative mode is perfect for actually playing with others and trying to play as if your life depended on it by taking care of your assignment. Save for the promise of what could have been, First to Fight is quite entertaining. It's only too bad that some of the elements that were only loosely introduced could not have been made more of a focus or an option in the game.

Mark Leung

(July 6, 2005)


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