a very interesting one to say the least. i really wanted to like this game and i did like a lot of parts about it, but eventually the game really got to my head. personally i want to rate it 3.25 stars but that's not an option.

pretty much everything about the game is stellar. graphics are amazing, gunplay is solid, healing mechanics are intuitive, controls are great, story is decent and the movies in between are cool. some of the environments are extremely immersive. unfortunately the AI and the sequence scripting sandbag it to all hell.

for the scripting between sequences you have to stand in very specific parts of the map despite them being open-ish. there were quite a few instances within the game where i would reach the end of the map and have to turn back (sometimes being shot down in the process) to stand in a specific spot to end the sub-mission that i was playing. you will also eventually go into multitudes of spots where enemies will literally spawn in thin air right in front of you and will frag you immediately.

the squad AI isn't that good anyways and they constantly let enemies run behind them while not being able to hit the broad side of a barn, which got me killed more times than i can count. there was also one point within the fourth mission set where i triggered something which made one of the squadmates block stairs that i was supposed to go up which made me have to restart the entire mission. it constantly feels like you're doing all the work and that you're a one man-team rambo (the only time when i actively saw my teammates get kills was on the mission with the foxholes), but at the very least it doesn't have that stupid thing that a lot of squad based fpses have where the enemies only and specifically target you, so they provide for being good distractions/bullet sponges.

also either the enemy AI is completely stupid sometimes and will not notice you in front of them or they have faze clan level aim and can shoot you down from a long distance with a type 56 and kill you within milliseconds. there's no in between.

there were a couple parts where the squad AI was doing absolutely jack or i got softlocked out of certain sequences too much to the point where i was just tempted to cheat and i ended up doing just that in a couple (probably 2 or 3) of the sub-missions. i really liked a lot of the missions though, and they were very immersive, but for example, on the very last mission where you have to rush the hill to meet up with another platoon, my squad would literally just stand in one spot below the hill and literally not do anything, so unless i turned on godmode, i would just die within milliseconds because there would be multiple enemies with a height advantage on me with almost no good cover spots.

i honestly thought the AI never passed a beta stage or something and my suspicions were pretty much confirmed when i found out the main guy who was working on the AI for this game, and who was a revolutionary at making AI in games back in the day (eric dybsand, may he rest in peace) passed away about four months before the game released, and i assume they either never fixed anything after he passed or the other fella who picked up his work did not do it justice at all. apparently someone made a mod to fix the AI on moddb but i forgot to download it.

but yeah, otherwise decent-ish game which could have been made into a really good one with some simple fixes. genuinely one of the hardest fpses i have ever played, and was honestly more difficult than far cry 1 with the hiding system bugged out, but the difficulty is mainly because of how poor some things within the game are implemented.

Call of Duty Vietnam on a budget

I actually am in this games corner. I love Vietnam and the Vietnam War setting, and I wish there were more games like this. The characters are fun enough and the gun play is actually quite satisfying, but there's too many flaws to ignore.

I want to get it out of the way right now that I did not finish this game. I played about 5 hours of this game, then didn't play for about two weeks. Upon returning, there is an unbearable stuttering in the game that I can't fix. This along with fatigue of doing the exact same thing over and over has led me to call it quits and end the game.

SO, stuttering, launch issues, and screen-tear galore, likely cause this is a 2004 game running on Windows 10, but it must be noted.

The game itself is actually not so bad, it's fairly competent.

For 2004, this game is beautiful. Really great looking game, though its scale is quite small. Despite being in a large jungle, you are basically walking down a hallway the entire game, it's just a very well disguised hallway. Missions involve shooting people, shooting people, and shooting people. You will clear villages, you will clear bunkers, you will clear zones, that's basically it. There are some fun vehicle sections that bring much needed variety, but they too are just shooting people endlessly.

The story isn't anything of note. There's not really any interesting plots though the game puts you in interesting situations often.

Honestly I may have finished this game if it weren't for all the technical problems, but without that this game is simply a 2004 FPS game that has average mechanics, an average story, and is set in the Vietnam war, and that's really all there is to it.