All right, soldier; are you ready for some butt-kicking, rocket-launching, team leading action? Sir, yes sir! Desert Storm II: Conflict in Baghdad is a squad based shooter full of 10 action packed missions ranging from reconnaissance missions to daring escapes that although have their perks, just don’t seem to have the polish of other squad based shooters. Although not a bad game by any means, unless you’re into squad shooters or military games, this may not be your kind of game.

I think I should start off where Desert Storm II really shines: the controls. Now, the Gamecube controller is not always the easiest to handle, but Desert Storm seems to have found a way to put all the buttons in just the right place. The typical control scheme involves your right trigger for firing, your X button for opening your weapons menu, left trigger for first person view mode, etc. but what I like is the way they set up voice commands to your squad. By holding the Z button, you can then press another corresponding buttons such as A, in order to send an order to your fellow soldiers. This works much better than bringing up a menu and selecting the command, because you can give commands in the heat of the battle. Although commands are limited to follow, hold position, advance, fire at will, and cease-fire; that is all you really ever seem to need. For the most part, so long as you set your buddies to “fire at will”, you may never have to do any work yourself. While not perfect, your teammates AI will impress you at times. For instance, if you tell one of your partners to charge an area, it’s not uncommon for him to whip out a grenade and throw it mid-stride, blasting enemy troops and clearing the area. There were a couple times when I choose the sniper character and just sat back and watched as I sent my companions forth to wreak havoc on Iraqi forces, surprised to find not one of them had fallen during the battle.

Another shining point in the game is the sound effects. Presented in Dolby Surround, you almost feel like you’re in the middle of a battlefield throughout the duration of each of the missions. The guns firing, the tanks rumbling, your ally yelling, “Medic!” all sounds crisp and clear. Also, the accompanying music is enough to rile up some of those patriotic instincts in you, setting the pace of the game wonderfully. You’ll hear happy patriotic music after completing a mission and courageous patriotic music during the tougher parts of the mission. It’s easily one of the better sounding war games on the market, if not the best.





However, I’m afraid that that’s about where we scratch down past the good things about this game and start to find the unrefined core of this game. The variety of missions in Desert Storm II is pretty good, although there are only ten of them, which is disappointing. In order to make up for the lack of missions, each mission is rather lengthy. Some can take upwards to an hour or so, and the shortest one takes about half an hour. Level length is a good thing, but lack of checkpoints is not. Many, many times I found myself at the very end of the mission, only to have a tank come out of nowhere and blast me to bits, forcing me to start over and replay the 45 minutes I had just put into the game. This can get frustrating, especially once you die a couple of times in the map. Believe me, it’ll happen. Some levels seem like they can’t be beaten unless you die in it a couple times so that you know where everything is. For example, one of your teammates carries an anti-tank mine that, as the name suggests, is potentially very useful. However, the only times I ever knew when to use it were when I died and on my second play through, remembered the tanks location.