When I first started up Full Spectrum Warriors: Ten Hammers I sighed. Well, that's an understatement - all the air in my lungs decided to vacate the premises to get away from my despair. It's what I've always hated about American games about the American military - it was the music. There's nothing like starting an action game with an overly done, overly clichéd, overly patriotic theme that's been done to death then resurrected to be done to post-death. Then with the help of a Satanic wizard, the process was repeated.

It's not that I have a problem with patriotic music; it's just that it has been in every single game about the US military that it just makes you want to charge your men out in front of a tank and have them beat it with sticks just so they will be massacred. I don't normally rout for the bad guy, but if I hear this every single time I play a shooter based on the military I'm going to go insane - seriously, there's this thing called originality, just because the guys wear the same uniform in every game doesn't mean you need the identical music either.

Now that one gripe is aside, let's get onto the game; you lead between one and four squads, each with the ability to break down into the individual fire teams of two men, allowing you to perform flanking manoeuvres or provide cover fire while your other team gets in place to flush out the enemy with a grenade. If used intelligently this can be extremely helpful, nay, essential, in getting through the missions easily. However, when you can potentially end up dealing with eight teams scattered around the place, it can become quite hectic.

The story starts in the Tien-Hamir region of Zekistan, which was previously a quiet area after the events of Full Spectrum Warrior, but because of the lack of military presence in the area this is where all the militants have moved and not all of them appear to be of the same creed. So not only is there more than one side, but they're also all against you, which means you now have a big task ahead of you.

Your main squad is supposed to become like an avatar and it is intended for you to get attached to them; however, this doesn't happen, as I only ever learnt one of the men's names and that's because he frequently died. His repeated death only made me feel contempt for him, which I don't think was the intention, but that certainly was the effect. There's also not much to the soldiers in your squad; I got to know them better by their designations rather than by their names.

Another feature is that you frequently acquire tanks for short periods of time, which seem to appear randomly - the first time, I shot our tank with a grenade until I realised it was on my team and someone had neglected to mention that there would be a tank parked around the corner. When you do get to control these, it's usually only for an extremely limited time and in an extremely limited way; basically they're just there to cover your position with heavy machine gun fire. The final combat feature is helicopters, which you can call in to perform air strikes and the likes, but again these are extremely limited.

The downside of the gameplay starts to poke its ugly head early in the game. If you lose more than two men it is game over - when you only have two men this is fair enough, but like I said earlier, when you have eight teams losing three men, it will happen a lot. This isn't helped by the AI being extremely proficient and in the second level this becomes a tedious fact of gameplay, as you have a BMP (an old Soviet anti-infantry tank) to contend with. The mission includes running directly through the tank's line of fire, which means you have to distract it to get its turret facing the other way and this is where the game starts to get tedious.

You clear the area completely with only the BMP left, you've got the mission objective of detonating the roadblock and its detonator lies past the tank in a small dead end alley, which means that you have to run past the BMP twice. So you don't have to count, this means risking two men twice to distract the BMP and two men twice to run across the street, which means there's a high probability that someone will get hit and that sadly means you have to expose the men to the tank again so you can drag the injured man to cover.

This isn't where the fun ends, as you have to loop back around a long path to where you started and then cross the BMP again, although this time it's only running across a narrow strip, as it can aim between buildings. It doesn't sound hard, right? Wrong! Once you start crossing, the tank sights you from well over five hundred metres away and it then somehow manages to gun down an entire squad and it's game over. You can then resume from detonating the blockade, which means you have to repeat the whole process of getting through the BMP's line of fire and then looping around to where you can try the street crossing again. My theory of gaming is that you shouldn't be smacking your head against the desk on only the second level of a game from sheer frustration. Not only is the insane marksmanship of the AI a problem, but they also respond extremely fast, so you advance your men and whack you have two men down with an enemy who knows you're coming.

The tactical nature of the game is initially fun to play with, but it soon becomes too clinical, in that it's more like a puzzle game with guns instead of an action game, as it passes beyond the realm of fun and into the realm of frustration, because one wrong move usually means that you end up with two men down in open territory and no way of dragging them to cover so they can get patched up. It's a tragic flaw for what could have potentially been a great game, as just about everything else is top notch, and even the controls are easy to handle right from the start, yet because of the insanely difficult AI and the clinical approach to combat, this means that it'll only be a great game for those who can tolerate it.

However, those who can tolerate have some of the most realistic environments I have seen to play around in, as for once the urban sprawl has real sprawl. You get dumpsters, cars, concrete blockades, trashcans, papers, vegetable carts and just about anything else you could expect to see in an urban city. Papers get kicked up and thrown about, car windows get potted when they're fired at and the vegetable carts get turned into shards of wood when used briefly as cover.

The soldiers are highly detailed, but retain a certain cartoon edge and in my opinion this helps the soldiers look more realistic than their counterparts in games that go for super realistic faces. This, I believe, is to do with the men being more caricatured, so you see one guy with a slim face and the guy next to him has a square jaw, whereas in most games everyone seems to have identical head shapes when they're trying to be realistic. Another thing the graphics engine must be praised on is the fact that no one in the game looks like an action man reject with glossy skin. I find it exceptionally difficult to get into a game when I'm laughing at the bad guys, which appears to be a recurring problem in most first person shooters lately - I'm not sure if it's the early gaming thing of replacing everyone with zombies being reborn with action men or just a load of contrast-blind graphics designers.

The sounds are equally impressive in that they feel like they've been taken directly from the war in Iraq, which adds greatly to the game's realism. However, the music does falter with the overly patriotic feel, as it is after all a game about the US military, but in recent years any game about the US military seems to have gone with the exact same music as every other game - either some musician is getting money thrown at him for one game theme tune or for the past five years so many games have released with almost identical themes that I can no longer recognise the difference between them. Originality would certainly have been a boon to the music department.

The co-op multiplayer is possibly the best element to Ten Hammers, as it allows you to work with friends, although you'll be lucky if it doesn't end up as a bickering match between which positions you should move to. It also eases the frustration factor, as it's more something to laugh about than the single player is. Although some missions appear to be fruitless on the surface, they turn out to be entertaining to play and for me that's all I need for multiplayer.

Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers claims to be 'the most authentic and realistic combat experience ever' and I would tend to agree with that. However, realism in games isn't necessarily a good thing, as most players tend to be trying to get away from realism and into a fictional world. When you die for making a single wrong move it seriously drains the enjoyment that can be taken from playing a game; nevertheless, those of you who are looking for a truly realistic and strategic war game and who don't mind the high difficulty level this entails, will absolutely love Ten Hammers.

Reviewed by Nik Gregory for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).