Targets of opportunity – Conflict: Desert Storm

Way back in 1988, I noted that reviewers of Ocean’s Platoon video game were more repulsed than I expected by the idea of a game set in a real-life war from less than two decades previous. Come Desert Strike, a much more recent but lightly fictionalised war proved less of an issue. By 2002, the prevailing norms had changed further still, and a game explicitly set in the same conflict, barely a decade old, raised nary an objection in all the reviews I could find. Instead, Dean Evans in the UK’s Official PlayStation 2 Magazine comments that it “makes a refreshing change from the current vogue for war games to be set in the WWII era”, pleased with the more modern weapons. What I would give for something as earnestly pointed as “The game does trivialise a serious subject and you may find some aspects of it stick in the throat” from Ace magazine on Platoon.

Conflict: Desert Storm gives you a tutorial with a comedy barking drill sergeant and then brings you right up to speed on the opening of the Gulf War, thrown straight into fighting your way into an Iraqi camp to rescue a captive demolitions expert. Soon you will be personally rescuing the Emir of Kuwait and blowing up anti-aircraft missiles to support the first airstrikes of the war. Anyway, back in that first rescue mission, after a bit of third-person killing (where I found weaving diagonally and making fulsome use of the auto-aim proved a winning tactic) meeting a friendly soldier brings you into the real point of the game: controlling a squad. 

Your squad gets bumped up to four members by a few missions in, and you can take control of any of them, swap items between them and issue orders to the others to wait, follow, or fire. Beyond a few words when you first meet them (regional accents!) you don’t exactly get to know them, but with their different expertise they are not quite functionally interchangeable. Best to have your demolitions expert carry out the C4 planting and detonating to explode the stuff that the rigid mission structure lets you explode (at one point I tried using C4 to get through a not-particularly-sturdy-looking fence; it wasn’t in the plan, so it did nothing). Even if it weren’t for your squaddies’ specialist skills affecting how well they use different weapons, it would be handy to use them for different things. It’s a superior alternative to using the fiddly inventory, scrolling through a list to try to find an anti-tank weapon… by which time the tank has blown you up.

As long as the tank doesn’t blow up your entire squad, though, it’s not the end for you. Members who have been shot too many times, or hit with a big rocket, or blown up or whatever, enter a knocked-out state rather like that in RPGs. Their profile picture gets replaced by an image of dog tags, and they are kind of dead, but very much revivable. Your medical kits are, in Final Fantasy terms, Hi-Potion and Phoenix Down rolled into one, and as long as you use one on a downed teammate within a generous set time, they will be right back up and at ‘em. Fail to do so and they finally actually die, to be replaced next mission by another soldier from a long virtual queue, with a different name and skills less levelled up.

It was that familiar process more than any other which settled my impression of Conflict: Desert Storm. It’s a lot like Cannon Fodder in 3D without the satire or the compelling simplicity, with a touch of Command & Conquer’s treatment of people as resources without the wider resource management challenges or messages. You can choose to control either the American special forces or the British SAS, but extremely little changes as a result. You get four replaceable guys to control through key moments either way, with very little to identify them beyond a name and rank, although that is still far more than the completely dehumanised Iraqis get.

Conflict: Desert Storm feels aggressively depersonalised throughout, even compared to games where you only ever see your character as a hand holding a gun. For all that it gives some background details and names and dates, your missions have a sense of dry detachment too, rendering its setting little more than a provocation which didn’t even provoke. The history element, the introductions told in past tense, feels there just to reduce the space of possibility further, restricting the board on which you push your pawns around to meet the challenges of the game’s set actions. The result is real-life war turned into logistics, and not even very good logistics.

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Top of the charts for week ending 21 September 2002:

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