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Conflict Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad
by Jolex Del Pilar
Wednesday, November 19 2003
Gotham Games' sequel features great solo action, but is best with a few friends.
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Title:
Conflict Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad
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Platform:
Xbox
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Publisher:
Gotham Games |
Developer:
Pivotal Games Limited |
#
of Players: 1 - 4, Xbox Live |
Genre:
Action
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Origin:
United States
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Expected
Release:
November 2003 |
Grapevine:
The A.I is a lot smarter this time around, using cover, and picking shots a lot more logically. |
For personal computers, there have been a lot of great shooters released in the past couple of years including such celebrated titles like Half-Life, Unreal, and Rainbow Six. For the consoles, with the exception of Halo, the pickings have been slim and most of the time, the great console shooters are simply ports of PC versions.
With Conflict Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad, it's a different story. The series started off on the consoles and enjoyed much success before being ported to the PCs. The Conflict Desert Storm series can best be described as an interesting mix of accurate, realistic, shooter gameplay, similar to Ghost Recon from Red Storm, and Halo, a much more action oriented shooter from Bungie. What this gives birth to is a shooter that features squad based gameplay that although is challenging, also gives room for error unlike the "one shot, one kill" scenarios often played out in Ghost Recon.
The story of Conflict Desert Storm II takes us all the way back to 1991. The first Iraqi War has just concluded and the day has been saved by Coalition forces. However, many POWs were never found, and that's where you come in, as either a member of the elite counter-terrorist group known as Delta Force, or a member of the British SAS. The game takes place over 10 or so missions which have your team rescuing fellow soldiers, liberating POWs, and eliminating weapons sites. The missions are fairly varied and don't fall into monotony. You can also modify the difficulty of a level, but due to some excellent A.I, the game remains a challenge even on the easiest setting. It can't be emphasized enough how much of an improvement the A.I is in the sequel than the original Conflict Desert Storm. While I was able to breeze through the original game pretty rapidly, CDS II requires a slower, more calculated, playing style if you want to get past the first two levels alive.
Between missions, a "Blackhawk Down" style map is presented to show the locations of major objectives of the mission.
The biggest strength of CFS II though remains its excellent multiplayer mode, which now includes an Xbox Live option, though the 4-player split screen mode allows for better comaraderie when you bust this game out when friends are over. The ability to coordinate with friends makes this game an excellent multiplayer, squad based game, on par with Ghost Recon and in some ways, a better experience because the game is a lot more forgiving than Ghost Recon is.
The only weak point in CDS II's proverbial armor is the visual experience. Though the graphics aren't exactly horrible, they are clearly a step below the current lot of shooters like Halo, Ghost Recon, and Unreal. The Xbox version is clearly the best version visually, but the low-res textures are still visible even on this hardware.
However, as you may know, a game's visual experience is only one part of a whole, and as a whole, CDS II: Back to Baghdad is an excellent game that is great as a solo experience but absolutely excels as a multiplayer experience. With the addition of Xbox Live and possible content download, the game jumps up another notch. As a sum of its parts, Conflict Desert Storm II is a great game that would be a great addition to anyone's gaming library, especially anyone interested in solid squad based action.
--- Jolex Del Pilar
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