Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad is centered around four special forces soldiers; Bradley, Foley, Connors, and Jones. The 1991 Gulf War’s most highly-decorated Special Forces soldiers, the fighting man’s fighting men. As Patrol Alpha-Two, they took part in some of the most notorious engagements of the Desert Storm campaign. In this game you take command of your squad of Special Forces operatives to strike at Iraq’s evil dictator, and his fascist regime. Armed with an authentic arsenal of high-tech weapons and vehicles, your squad will face impossible odds in this battle against tyranny. Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad isn’t a groundbreaking game. In a lot of ways it is still like Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six and SOCOM, and it’s not like you haven’t seen it before.
Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad draws its’ gameplay from reality and real life events. In this game it doesn’t take long for the intense action to begin. There is a feeling of tension throughout the game, but instead of taking a successful squad-based tactical shooter, they take it and water it down removing most of the complexity of the game.
One of the first things you’ll find troublesome with Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad is the amount of inventory you can store in your backpack. It’s just wrong. Your backpack must be the size of a small truck since you can carry frag grenades, machine guns, anti-tank rockets, air to air missiles, claymore mines, binoculars, smoke grenades, a flare gun, health packs, and a survival knife. At any given time you can be carrying up to 30 to 35 objects. This must be the new and improved government backpack for a soldier! Any soldier can use and carry any weapon of any type. The only difference is that some have better skills with different weapon types. You have the freedom to change between men at any point to take advantage of their special weapon skills as needed.
The AI is very dumb. As for your teammates you must keep an eye on them at all times or they will do something stupid. For example, they will just stand out in the open until they are dead. The AI for the enemy is just as dumb as the line of enemies that will just keep coming no matter how many dead bodies are laid out in front of them. How much fun is a game if all you have to do is stand there and they keep coming and you keep mowing them down? On the other hand some enemies seem like they know every move. Some of the enemy tanks and soldiers know exactly where to aim although you are hidden. This becomes a major aggravation at times. Enemy soldiers also have a habit of appearing from nowhere to attack you from the back even though you cleared everything possible. One bad part is that once you know what happens and when to expect it, the game becomes an exercise in trial and error. This is just wrong and really drags the gameplay down.
The way your soldier moves is very odd, it’s kind of a side-step movement that is very hard to get use to and makes the targeting with guns hard. Controls are a little odd until you get use to the side-step and the targeting. You can zoom in with a sniper rifle to see the man’s face that you are trying to pick off which is pretty cool. Controls are responsive and issuing commands is very simple, but the way you cycle through your men and inventory could use some help.
Graphics for Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad are just run of the mill, nothing special. The backgrounds are the same old deserts, mountains, etc. Detail of the character models is average with the buildings lacking any detail to speak of. The inside of the building is even less detailed. It’s a nice touch to see tracers on the bullets that you fire, but overall the graphics are very dull and tan and not-so-realistic.
Sound was good with the guns, explosions for mines, and tanks sounding very realistic. You can also hear the men calling out each and every kill, but this gets a little annoying at times.
Final Verdict
The action works well in Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad but the whole game is run from script. If you see something at a certain point you will always see it at that point. The problems with the simple AI, a backpack the size of a Buick and vague objectives makes this game not much fun and causes it to not have much replay value.
Score
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