YOUR SKILL WILL MEAN YOUR SURVIVAL

This line is so true in Conflict: Desert Storm, the best game of its type on the Xbox so far. You are either the most elite force in America known as the Delta Force, or the most elite force in England known as Team SAS. You have control of 4 playable characters, each with their own special abilities and as the levels progress they slowly climb the rank ladder to become better, and more respected soldiers.

You can be one of four characters including: The leader, Sniper, Heavy-weapons dude, or an Engineer. One by themselves would be slaughtered by the Iraqi forces, but together as one you are the most elite tactical force ever known in 1991.

As there is heart stopping, realistic tactical action designed by a former SAS officer, this game has become all that it was hyped up to be. With lots of levels to go through, and the difficulty gradually rising, a mate and I stayed up all night playing this. In fact, we got to sleep at around 6am putting Desert Storm through its paces.

The first level is the same as the level that you get on the Xbox Magazine demo disc, except it has more buildings and there are sheep or goats or cows, it's really hard to tell exactly what they are, but you can blow them up if you like. As you progress through the first 3 levels you meet up with your team, and then away you go to battle the entire Iraqi force with just 4 men on foot. Occasionally you can call for Air-Strikes, but it can be incredibly hard to do when you have 4 ' 5 tanks waiting to obliterate you!

One of the best features I found about this game is that when one of your squad members dies, you can go and heal them whilst they're on the ground wounded. You only have about a minute to do this, so don't send your friend off on a wild suicide run if you can't rescue him in time! There would have to be about 20 hours of gameplay all up and you will find yourself replaying a lot of them as they're great fun! This extends the replay value nicely, but naturally, some levels are better than others. You can save your game at any time during a level but you are only allowed a limited number of saves.

The objectives you're given in the game are all different, and there are different tactics you can employ to complete them successfully. For example, if you run out of rockets, you have to run up to the tank and set plastic explosives on it and then run away and detonate it. The tank does not fire if you are standing right next to it, as it knows that it would be blown to pieces if it did.

There is a Warthog type vehicle in the game, well it kinda looks like the one out of Halo, except one that was maybe built back in 1990. It has a rocket launcher turret on the back, and the passenger seat is armed with a machine gun. You can also have your other friend sitting in the back. The tank you get to drive is not very strong, and smoke starts coming out of it very quickly (as does the Jeep) which I thought was very dodgy. Yep, your vehicles can be destroyed and the levels they're used in have LOTS of Iraqi's shooting at you so they can be taken out pretty easily by the enemy A.I

I don't have much experience with graphics in war games, but I'd have to say that they were better than the medal of honour graphics on PS2 (gasp no). I've given that game a fair amount of time, and it looked quite similar to Conflict: Desert Storm, except it's a different war of course...

One thing they should have made better about the graphics is the Desert Storm. Seeing as they put this term in the title of the game, you'd think that when the sandstorm hit it would be an awesome sight. Instead, the frame rate becomes shocking. It is nothing compared to the sandstorm we see in Morrowind. The player models look pretty good with some good animations, but some slightly soft textures. There's also some squad animations as well like when you give your squad mates orders and they'll wave each other forward which enhances the 'team' feel of the game.

The soundtracks in Conflict: Desert Storm get very disturbing, very quickly. So luckily, they put in the great feature of playing your own music. This brought a whole new liking to me for the song 'Nickelback ' How You Remind Me'. I don't know why, but I never liked this song but when I'm listening to it whilst killing a bunch of Desert Storm enemies, the song doesn't seem so bad!

All of the squad are hooked up on walkie talkies, and they talk to each other very quietly. It's hard to understand exactly what they're saying, but after a while you learn the key combinations to get them to follow you, or to go ahead, or to stay where they are, or to stop shooting if you're going to sneak up behind an Iraqi force. The way you could sneak up behind a baddie and slit his throat without him noticing was very Splinter Cell like, and made the game just that little bit more enjoyable.

As said before, when I hired this game a friend and I stayed up until 6am playing it. We played a couple of levels of Halo of course, but put Conflict: Desert Storm on again for some more bloodshed. The multiplayer is no doubt the best feature of the game, as it offers 4 player Co-operative, which is more than Halo could offer us 'sigh' and once you start, you get hooked enough to try and finish it. I'm not too sure how far we got through the game, but we played it for about 9 or 10 hours and it still hadn't ended.

When its 2 players, player 1 controls the Leader and the Heavy-weapons dude, and player 2 controls the Sniper and the Engineer. You can give each other the guns, so of course I ordered my friend to give me his sniper rifle in exchange for my chain gun. This works well with sharing around the medipaks when you send one of your men off on a suicide run.