Operation: Vietnam

Welcome to Vietnam. Known as “Sarge” by your squad mates, you were leading the team successfully through various operations around the Nung River when things went horribly wrong. A Viet Cong rocket struck your helicopter and down you went. Fortunately, you woke up in one piece and had somehow avoided capture, but your squad was nowhere to be found. Do you have what it takes to find them and get back home?

That is the basic premise of Operation: Vietnam, a mission-based action game by Majesco that plays like a mix of the classic games Commando and Cannon Fodder. Missions consist of traversing the landscape from a top-down perspective searching for various items and gunning down almost anything that moves.

Your team is made up of four characters each with their own unique ability and unoriginal nickname. There’s Sarge, the team leader, who packs an automatic rifle. Doc, the medic, is a bit lacking in power with his slow rate of fire but is more effective when using health packs. Scopes, the sharpshooter, can pick off bad guys from far away as well as spot land mines. Finally, Hopper, the heavy weapons expert, can take out turrets and vehicles with his rocket launcher.

At the start of each mission you are thrown on one side of a huge map, and it is up to you find your way around to any supplies or objectives. In certain ways, this style of play works great. It allows for some serious exploration as there are often many areas off of the main path just begging for you to check them out, and you’ll want to make sure to. You can find much needed supplies such as health packs, frag grenades, and smoke grenades, but more importantly, you will find more enemies to kill as well as rare dog tags, both of which the game will tally at the end of each missions and the more you have, the better your score will be. Getting a high enough score will unlock a bonus mission, some of which are throwbacks to classic games such as Pac-Man and Smash TV. On the other hand, the game is very slow paced, and coupled with the large maps you might sometimes find yourself wanting to simply get to the end as fast as you can to avoid boredom.

Of course, even with the exploration aspect, Operation: Vietnam is mainly a combat-focused action game. Waves of enemies will try to thwart your plans every step of the way, and there are many options for fighting back. You have to keep in mind each team member’s strengths and weaknesses and switch between them as needed. Of course, since you can only control one person manually, you can give some basic commands to the others if you feel the need. The touch screen shows each character’s status and simply tapping their portrait will allow you to pick certain tactics whether you want them to stay in position, follow you, or seek out enemies on their own. Unfortunately, other than a few simple puzzles where you have to make them stand in place, I never felt the need to have them do anything except follow me as it is the best way to avoid taking excess damage.

While the game does offer a decent amount of options for combat, it can get repetitive. Every mission feels basically the same, and it’s easy to fall into a pattern of slogging through missions using Scopes to pick off enemies before they even know you’re there. They sometimes mix things up a bit when they split up your team and you only have two to command, but it’s still not enough to make things interesting. Because of all this, the game is not fun to play for extended periods of time. On the bright side, the boss fights are fun and challenging and are worth looking forward to.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of this game is the controls. Instead of taking advantage of the touch screen for aiming, your crosshairs simply point in the direction your character is walking, which means to aim at enemies you have to run straight at them. Luckily, there is an auto-aim feature in place to remedy the limited eight-way aim the D-pad allows, so you don’t have to be precise, but strafing still would have been a nice addition.

In the graphics department, Operation: Vietnam isn’t bad. The environments are detailed and effectively make you feel lost in the jungle. Just as well, the cutscene illustrations and character models have a certain “cartoony” quality to them which is rather charming and shows the game does not take itself too seriously. Still, though, the character models are small and pixilated which can be unattractive, and there could have been more variety in enemy and villager models.

In addition to detailed environments, the game feature’s some decent sound effects that help set the mood. Chickens squawk, crickets chirp, and guns go boom all in a way that fits the game well. The menus and cut scenes have some nice music, but the missions have none at all which is too bad since some atmospheric music might have increased the tension level and made the missions more enjoyable.

Gameplay: 6.5
The gameplay suffers in that it is basically the same in every mission. The slow pacing doesn’t help either. However, it gets some points for having fun boss battles and a decent amount of replayability if you want to unlock and master all the missions.

Graphics: 7.0
The environments have a surprising amount of detail but tend to get boring as most of them look very similar.

Sound: 7.0
An abundance of nice sound effects set up a nice atmosphere that could have been even better with some music during missions. The menu and cut-scene music is decent enough.

Difficulty: Medium
The game starts off easy, but you may find yourself restarting some of the middle or later missions.

Concept: 8.0
There are plenty of war games these days, but the mix of action, exploration, and strategy helps this one feel a bit unique.

Overall: 6.5
Operation: Vietnam is not a bad game by any mean, but it has certain flaws that I would like to see corrected if Majesco decides to make another game in the same style. It can be hard to play the game for more than 10-15 minutes at a time due to the repetitive gameplay. That said, the game does a pretty good job of delivering a play style reminiscent of classic top-down action games, and the addition of fun bonus missions is, well… a bonus. At only $20, it’s at least worth a shot if you’re a fan of the genre.