There's another enemy characteristic that does not really affect gameplay,
but is worth mentioning for its humor value. The enemy soldiers don't
really say much until they die, or rather until after they die. When they
give up the ghost, enemy corpses yell out several lines of dialogue in
Vietnamese. I have no idea what they were saying, but it kept making me think about
death scenes in operas, where a fatal blow is usually followed by several
minutes of singing about it by the victim.
 |
| Tank on fire. |
The game's designers made a few strange decisions in the modeling of the
soldiers. Fatigue is tracked for each soldier, and moving shooting, or
anything else causes the stamina meter to drain. Once this meter is empty,
the soldier must stop and rest and can not perform any actions. Soldiers
constantly get fatigued during a mission, but don't suffer any ill effects from
wounds. A soldier whose health meter is nearly empty moves and performs
the same as one who is at full strength. When you also take into the
account the fact that soldiers in the game are blessed with infinite ammunition,
it makes you wonder why the developers bothered with the fatigue factor.
The game's one strong point is its graphics. The jungle environment's
look good and are packed with details such as flowering bushes and swaying
trees. The game's 3D camera works pretty well, although sometimes it
inexplicably decides to stop scrolling. The models used for the soldiers
are well animated and feature a lot of idle movements that give them a more
realistic look. The soldier details such as uniforms and equipment look
pretty good as well, although the details start to get a little fuzzy on the
highest zoom level.
Although Platoon is a squad-based strategy game based on a war movie, it is
hard to recommend it to any of the gamers to whom such games would normally
appeal. It's not really based on the movie, it's not a good simulation of
the warfare and tactics of the Viet Nam conflict, and it falls short as a
strategy game.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
51%. How could such a complex war inspire such a shallow game?
System Requirements: Pentium III 600; 256 MB RAM; 32 MB
Video RAM; 8x CD-ROM; 570 MB Hard Drive
Space; Mouse.
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