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Six Minutes Of Looking At Six Days In Fallujah

Let's leave the controversy at the door and see what kind of shooter Konami and Atomic are working on.

No longer a valid cover point.
No longer a valid cover point.
Last week we all watched the announcement of Konami's new shooter Six Days In Fallujah, which promises to drop you into the middle of the current Iraq war's bloodiest battle to date. At that time, you probably either voiced your displeasure with the game's setting--or called the people who did so "pansies." Since then, I've seen a brief, very hands-off demo of Six Days In Fallujah, so let's leave political correctness at the door and just talk about what kind of game this is, shall we?

What kind of game this is, of course, is a third-person modern military shooter with Middle Eastern level design and--judging by the way the screen desaturates when you take damage--a recharging health system. Use-of-ongoing-conflict-as-setting aside, you didn't have to be a huge Call of Duty 4 fan to predict that's the style of gameplay developer Atomic would be going for.

For all their realism, though, Call of Duty and other shooters on the market take place in mostly static environments. But Atomic Games' Peter Tamte rightly points out the degree to which real modern warfare truly decimates an urban environment, and in the interest of preserving that fact, the team has created an engine in which almost all of the game's level geometry is fully destructible. During the demo, Atomic commented that Six Days will change the way you're used to playing cover-based shooters because you'll no longer be able to trust any of that cover to protect you, at least not for very long.

And that's the first really intriguing thing I've heard about how this game will play. The destruction isn't over-the-top action-movie stuff, but instead seems to cover a broad spectrum of intensity. Firing a grenade launcher at a wall won't blow the entire wall apart, but it will chip away enough of it to send any enemies behind it scrambling for protection. The destruction seems to come at a price; the frame rate in the demo I saw dipped severely in a few places. But you expect that sort of thing to improve over the course of development, so I can't condemn the performance just yet.

More importantly, if destructible environments give Six Days in Fallujah a unique identity in an overly crowded genre, the technical hurdles will be worth surmounting. As for the subject matter, how you feel about that is purely a matter of taste.


Brad Shoemaker on Google+