Article Type: Review
Article Date: December 12, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: Platoon
Category: Real-Time Tactical
Developer: Digital Reality
Publisher: Strategy First and Monte Cristo
Release Date: November 15, 2002
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here
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Excellent Concept
Platoon presents the player with a 3D spinney-rotatey view of small chunks of Vietnam, populates the map with Viet Cong, and then provides the player with a force of US Army troopers to go clear the VC out in a pause-able real-time tactical battle. The basic concept is excellent. Sadly, the execution is not.
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Firefight in a rice paddy  |
Your intrepid reviewer found Platoon extremely unstable. This isn’t a common complaint on the Platoon web-boards, so it may just be this system; but it refused to play more than once through one mission before it crashed my computer. The patch did not help. What’s bizarre is that the preview beta of the game was more stable! Platoon does ship with a training mission that is both boring and confusing, though the manual is generally clear. Multiplayer play is possible via Internet or LAN, though commentary on the Platoon webboards suggests finding opponents is difficult.
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| VC machinegunner in a bunker |
Character Development
If the movie tie-in has you salivating or fuming, you may calm down now. The main use of the tie-in seems to be the name on the box and the opening video. Folks who buy this game for the tie-in are sure to be disappointed. In place of the movie, we find the story of Martin Lionsdale from 1965 through 1968. Lionsdale graduates from West Point and goes through “Special Military Training” to emerge into the US Army as a corporal; he also has a pregnant live-in girlfriend to whom he’s engaged.
Corporal was not a typo, by the way. The briefings seem to have been inspired by Commandos, and try to make each of the hero characters in the game special. Unfortunately, they also make them rather unbelievable. One character feels an overwhelming desire to enter the Army after reading Catch-22, and your anti-tank specialist, Tim Vaffrey, spends years of his life in “special military task forces specializing in eliminating terrorist threats” before going to Vietnam. This chap therefore now leads a LAW rocket team.
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| The sneaky hero character slips around an enemy base |
Gameplay
You control more than heroes. Your team may be assigned one or several rifle squads of five soldiers. Other specialist squads, such as machine gunners, LAW rocket specialists, and demolitions experts, consist of only one soldier. A number of these specialists cannot go prone, and you cannot order the members of the five-man rifle teams around individually. Fortunately, since these guys tend to die in missions, everybody except Martin Lionsdale is reincarnated for the next mission. If Lionsdale dies, you lose the mission and must start over.
You’ve doubtless figured out by now that Platoon is not on the simulation end of the wargame spectrum. When only demolitions experts can carry grenades, and armaments like LAWs are treated as special skills, Platoon is headed towards the puzzle-game end, like Commandos. Commandos was a good game, so that isn’t necessarily a bad move.
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| Snipers and LAWs and M-113s! |
Game Saved…Not!
Missions are, indeed, puzzles. The briefing usually boils down to “sweep the map for enemy forces”, with variation coming from the need to hold terrain at some point or avoid killing a specific friendly Vietnamese. Your route through the map is largely pre-determined by the terrain, and the enemy awaits you in good ambushes or through scripted sequences. As a result, you’ll need to play most of the 12 missions several times while you figure out how to overcome the problem it presents. Replaying would be less frustrating if Platoon allowed for mid-mission saves. It doesn’t, which means you have to slog through the entire mission again if you screw up something towards the end.
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| Walk into the village - and get ambushed! |
Tactically Speaking…
Unfortunately, the puzzles aren’t especially interesting. There isn’t the Commandos gameplay of “sneak in and slit the guard’s throats so another can plant the bomb, then escape via rubber boat”. Instead, your team patrols through the terrain until the VC open up, and then you exchange fire until the VC die. The best way to patrol is by crawling forward through dense terrain, to avoid taking heavy losses when the ambush opens up.
Platoon simulates fatigue, though, and crawling eats up stamina. Moreover, different units in your force move at different speeds, so you must wait for the slowpokes to catch up if you want them to be present for the firefights. Thus the tactically sound approach, of short crawls with long pauses to reassemble, leads to tactically boring gameplay. You’ll spend a great deal of time moving units forward and then waiting for the rest to catch up.
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| Dead VC Tank! |
The firefights themselves are not especially exciting either. Your units will not fire without a personal request, after which they happily bang away at any enemy units in the squad they initially engaged. However, beyond this initial direction, your control in a firefight is limited to employing—or not—the heavy weapons at your disposal, which usually turns out to be a simple decision.
Lacks Focus
Platoon winds up stuck between two worlds, and doing service to neither. It could try to be a solid tactical battle game, in which case it needs to simulate the actions of individual soldiers better. Or it could concentrate on Commandos-style puzzles, in which case it needs to back off on the sweep-and-clear gameplay in favor of the sneak-and-slit Commandos gameplay. Instead, you wind up with puzzles in the form of the locations of ambushes, which cease to be surprises after you trigger them.
The only player interaction that’s required for the firefights is telling units to shoot, which is irritating because they ought to know enough to do it on their own. The essence of gameplay is presenting a player with meaningful, interesting decisions. Platoon does this poorly. It’s a shame, because Platoon has an intriguing concept. The graphics engine is reasonably pretty, and the game sounds good—but good graphics last 5 minutes, while good gameplay lasts forever.
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