Conflict - Desert Storm

Bradley, Foley, Connors and Jones. Four names you learn quickly, because the 2002 Gulf War squad shooter from Pivotal Games makes them the whole of your force, and losing one to a careless advance means finishing a mission with a hole where your sniper or demolitions man used to be. Their specialisms actually matter. The engineer defuses; the sniper sees; the heavy carries the launcher. You cannot substitute enthusiasm for the right man.

Control is the design's centre. You take direct command of one soldier and shunt the other three around with a command layer, setting them to hold, follow or fire at will, then swap bodies when the task calls for different hands. The camera can be dragged out for an overhead look at a compound before you commit, which was the closest a console game of the time got to the tactical pause of PC squad sims without drowning the player in menus. It works best when you treat it as a planning tool rather than a shooting aid.

The missions themselves run through familiar Desert Storm set pieces, Scud hunts, downed pilots, supply dumps, laser-designating targets for air support, and they are built as small problems with several approaches rather than corridors. Enemies sit in dug-in positions with mounted guns and technicals, and a frontal assault gets people killed fast. Picking off a gunner from three hundred metres out while the rest of the squad flanks is the loop the whole thing is tuned around, and it holds up because the AI is just competent enough to punish impatience.

What has aged is everything around that. Squadmates get stuck on terrain, the pathing occasionally sends a man into open ground you would never have sent him, and the aiming has the slightly greasy feel of a pre-twin-stick-standard console shooter. Weapon and skill progression carries between missions, which gives the campaign a quiet thread of investment rare in licensed-adjacent military games of the period. The split-screen co-op, two players sharing a four-man team, is where the game is at its most interesting, because arguing about who covers the rooftop is the design working exactly as intended.

It arrived before the modern military shooter calcified into scripted spectacle, and that timing is its advantage. Conflict: Desert Storm asks you to think about four men rather than one, and it is stubborn enough not to forgive you when you forget the other three.