A mediocre game with great terrain graphics

Good terrain graphics, the jungles of Vietnam look beautiful in this game. But the singleplayer gameplay is extremely linear, the storyline, dialogue, and characters are very weak (nothing like the relative polish of Medal of Honor).

Besides terrain, the graphics are rather bland and uninteresting. There's a serious lack of animation and effects in this game, as bullet hits into the terrain and people are essentially unnoticeable... and grenades and airstrikes explode in dull grey smoke effects. This makes you feel like you're playing in a very static-looking painting of a Vietnamese jungle, instead of a gunfire-filled battlefield.

The sound engine is weak, 3D sound through EAX seems to be very poorly implemented. AI is nice, or at least quite fun to fight, as it uses cover in the most realistic ways I've ever seen in a game. Weapon accuracy system is very poorly done, nothing like CS, DOD, or Clancy games.

Typical Vietcong session: Walk around jungles, look at map or follow guide guy, watch for traps in the floor, shoot Vietcong, hear lots of drawn out radio conversations with your commander, follow orders in a VERY linear fashion.

Multiplayer: Poor sound engine and extremely quiet footsteps make the gameplay experience more like BF1942 than DOD or CS. Even with 10 teammates right next to you, running at full speed, the near-silence of footsteps makes the experience extremely dull. There's no sense of scale, no size to the game. The game is too damn quiet. The audio is nothing but periodic gun fire. There are no radio commands, but only poorly done and ineffective voice sayings that your player calls out, for realism's sake. The advertised built-in voice chat is LAN only. There is no teamwork in this game.

Both realism settings in matches make the game unenjoyable and repetitious. In standard mode, you have crosshairs, and a HUD. This allows you to easily run around and gun people down, often while moving. Guns are far more accurate than anything you'll see in CS or DOD. In realistic setting "Vietnam mode", you lose everything on your HUD and are forced to use the ironsight feature on your guns to shoot (or cheat and put a dot in the center of your monitor... the game only removes the crosshair, not actually change the accuracy of the guns). When using ironsight, players are motionless. Trust me, the combat becomes very boring after just a bit of this..... In either settings, combat just never pulls you in. It's never immersive or exciting. There really seems ways for you to truly outsmart or outplay your opponents, outside of simply aiming and shooting better than them. Looking at the game score charts during play, this seemed very true, as it was rare that any non-sniper in the game ever had an impressive score. Instead, score seemed mostly dependent on luck or accidental teamwork.

Combat is repetitious because of the very open-terrain, and the unlimited amount of camping spots available to your enemies as you advance. Defending areas is ridiculously easy, attacking them very difficult. The poor sound engine is a major problem here, as your forced to rely on your visuals to acquire targets. Even enemies who are running right next to each other won't notice until one of them opens fire. And by then it's too late.

The MP game lacks a large amount of polish and common sense. One great feature of the game is the ability to call in air/artillery strikes. This is severely marred by the requirement of the player to speak into the radio for 30 seconds, entirely helpless, still, and VERY bored as you listen to the poorly scripted dialogue say "Skyhawk 1" a dozen times. Stuff like this shows a very weak QA department for this game.