Platoon

Apparently the most commonly heard phrase during the Vietnam War was, Grab your packs boys, we're moving out." Which is odd because I'd always thought it would have been more along the lines of, God NO!!! SWEET MOTHER OF CHRIST I DON'T WANT TO F-DIE!!! Shows what I know.

The former must be true though, as Monte Cristo has gone to great pains to tell anyone that will listen just how realistic a portrayal of the war Platoon is. To which I can only reply, 'cough'balls'cough'.

Stone Cold

First up, don't be expecting any real connection to Oliver Stone's brutally classic film of the same name. Yes it has the official licence and recreates the film poster on the box and in the intro sequence, but that and the occasional reference to a couple of the film's characters during a mission is as far as it goes.

Platoon the film brought home the full unvarnished horror of what that insanely futile war was all about. The brutality, the insanity, the loss of innocence, the narcotic abuse, the immoral behaviour towards the Vietnamese people, etc. Platoon the game is as bog-standard a squad-based RTS as it could possibly be, dressed in Vietnam clothing.

Vetting Procedure

If the concept is bog-standard, the implementation is where Platoon really falls down. An utterly worthless camera that is both achingly unfriendly to control, zooming and tilting on its own accord like a deranged Don Quixote, as well as useless for seeing anything further than about three feet in front of you.

A lack of any real tactical commands means you can only issue formation controls to pre-set groups of soldiers and have no flexibility at all when combining units. The movement speed of your troops means anyone with a slightly bigger gun than the others will invariably walk at about an eighth of the speed of anyone else. And as for realism, well, let's just say that one of my soldiers was able to carry on walking and fighting even after stepping on two landmines. It's about as realistic as The A-Team.

And so on and so on. There's loads more but I simply don't have the space. What's really annoying about it all is that these are issues that any amount of time spent game balancing and testing should have thrown up and which, had they been addressed, may actually have made Platoon a fairly decent game to play. As it is, it all feels as though even the developers didn't give a flying rat's arse about the game. Which just leaves us thinking why the hell should we?