Vietcong was made by a small developer in the Czech Republic by the name of Pterodon in conjunction with Illusion Softworks, the guys behind the Hidden and Dangerous series and the other surprise hit, Mafia. Released six months ago, Mafia received widespread acclaim for its highly authentic and atmospheric presentation and now Vietcong makes a similar kind of effort. It is just like Vietnam, or at least the way they portray it in the movies.

Vietcong is a first person shooter with tactical elements set during the Vietnam War (1964 - 1972). You are a sergeant Steve R. Hawkins of the US Army Special Forces and have been assigned to serve in the fictitious A-216 team based at the Nui Pek camp in the Central Highlands of Vietnam near the Cambodian border. The squad you lead consist of five other men: a radioman, machine gunner, pointman, an engineer, and spectacled medic who will keep you alive during missions. As team leader, you issue orders to the other soldiers to determine the way in which your missions will proceed. For instance, it's probably a good idea to tell your men to hold when you start laying out coordinates for artillery fire :)

The game contains a solid single-player campaign (over 20 missions) which will take a veteran player 8-10 hours to complete, and a beginner considerably longer. During the single player campaign Hawkins either works alone or with a squad of teammates to accomplish the various missions in the jungles. The jungle is full of simple but deadly traps that are hard to notice with an inexperienced eye, so you have to watch and listen to your point man. Moving through the jungle quickly will mean running the risk of hitting these snares, but moving too cautiously will often give the enemy an advantage. The mission goals are somewhat forgiving in how you should accomplish them, so every once in a while you will have no clue what to do.

For example, you must go down into the VC tunnels alone armed with a silenced pistol and a brick of C4 to seal off the tunnel. The tunnel scenes in this game remind me of old dungeon games with those mazes kinda long and boring. Fortunately, there are also a medley of escort missions and covert operations missions, which are much more interesting.

Vietcong features a large number of accurately modeled weapons. For the US, M1 Garand with Sniper Scope, M3 Grease Gun, Thompson submachinegun, M1 Carbine, Remington 870, Colt M1911 A1, M60, Winchester 70 (excellent hunting and sniper rifle), and the M79 40mm Grenade Launcher. The Vietcong weapons include the Mosin-Nagant, SVD Drugonov, SKS Simonov , a .38 revolver, the 7.7mm Tokarev TT 40, the Makarov, RPD-Degtarev, PPSh-41 Spaign, PPS-43, and old good Kalashnikov AK-47. Each gun has its own unique firing style and recoil, and many can be switched from fully automatic to burst fire or even single-fire mode for accuracy. Hand grenades and C4 explosive charges are also available.

The Multiplayer mode offers some decent replay value, as there are a number of different maps and game types you can choose from. There are the usual DM, Team DM and Capture the Flag modes, as well as Assault Team Game (an objective based mission set with goals like "protect the pilot"), Last Man Standing, Real War, and even Co-Op where players can team up against packs of AI-controlled enemies.

Vietcong is by far a much better game than average. The game takes some of the best new trends of first-person shooting and combines them with the Vietnam War to create a truly excellent and immersive first-person experience. Unfortunately the safe disk protection kills performance for a lot of people, sometimes cutting their frame rates in half. Thankfully, the US patch v1.01 (or this no-cd patch) takes care of that problem so be sure to grab it when you buy the game. You can also download this MP demo (71MB) / SP demo and visit Vietcong official website.

Minimum System Requirements:Intel Pentium III processor 500MHz, 128MB RAM, 800MB HDD space, DirectX 8.1-compatible 3D accelerator with 32MB RAM, DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card, CD-ROM 8x