Though an original game concept and a deviation from the norm of first person shooters and army building real time strategy games, the original Full Spectrum Warriors on Xbox and PC suffered from a lack of depth in game play and some frustrating camera and control issues. The fact that the PS2 version of the game compounds the original shortcomings in the game with lesser graphics than the other two easily forces this version into third place.

The basic concept of the game is strategy. You are an infantry squad leader in command of two fire teams. Thrust into emergency situations in hostile territory you have to maneuver your troops in such a fashion as to escape ambushes or secure specific objectives. You do this by having one fire team provide suppressive fire while the other moves to a position with a better vantage point. That is in essence, the game. There are fragmentation grenades, smoke grenades and even grenade launchers to mix it up a little bit, but that’s basically it.

And it would be great if not for the one-dimensional maps and the too sparse enemies. In a strategy game you have to have more than one path to victory and enough going on to feel immersed. If not, you lose the feeling that you are in control and feel led by the nose. With so few enemies the environment feels relaxed and not at all war-like.

But realism issues aside, the PS2 version suffers from control issues. Unlike the PC version that allows mouse input, the PS2 version is controlled with the analog sticks. While it is nice to have buttons for the major functions of the game, the analog stick cannot compare to the mouse for controlling this particular game. Having separate controls for the camera and the target selection icons is nice, but they can’t compare to the precision you get from using a mouse.

On all versions of the game the camera control is kludgy. It’s positioned behind the heads of the characters to create a feeling of being in the action, but most of the time it just serves to block your view of the area you are moving to. A toggled first person view would have been a good idea here to allow you to more accurately select where your fire team is moving.

Where the PS2 is noticeably different from the Xbox and PC versions is in the graphics. It’s common knowledge that the Xbox’s hardware is more powerful than the PS2’s. And it’s no surprise that PC hardware can be much more powerful than console hardware. This performance difference is obvious in the PS2 version of the game. The images seem darker and textures seem like they are lacking resolution. Aliasing seems to be a major difference between the PC and PS2 versions as well. It definitely exists on the PC, but with a graphics card capable of 4x or 8x antialiasing, it’s all but unnoticeable.

While I generally prefer the console systems to the PC (you can keep your hardware incompatibilities and your installation discs and I’ll enjoy my big screen TV and ceiling mounted surround speakers) I have to give Full Spectrum Warrior to the PC. Since it’s not really an action game, and since it depends so heavily on graphics and control to even get anything out of it, I’d recommend the PC version over the PS2 or the Xbox. And at twenty bucks or less for each of the three versions, it’s still a reasonable value. It still is a new game concept that hasn’t been done before and has merits as such. But when it comes to the platform, and you can call me old-fashioned, strategy games are played on the PC.