Full Spectrum Warrior Co-op Impressions

Full Spectrum Warrior came out of nowhere at E3 2003 and took the gaming world by surprise. With great graphics and gameplay uncommon on consoles, the squad-based tactical strategy game had a heap of promise. That promise is about to be realized this Tuesday when Full Spectrum Warrior ships to the public. Fortunately for myself and Doug "Curly Sue" Perry, box copies made their way to us a little early. While we've covered FSW quite a bit over the past year, one thing that no one has really touched on is the cooperative play.

We decided to remedy this by taking Full Spectrum Warrior onto Xbox Live as perhaps the first two people to play the box copy online (there were no other games to be found). What we found was that co-op makes for a very different experience than single player. Is that good or bad? I won't leave you in suspense -- co-op is even better than the impressive single-player. Yeah, this game is gonna rock your knob.

Basic Training
The first thing you need to know about co-op for FSW is that it's only online. That's right, you can only play co-op if you and your partner are logged on Xbox Live. There is no split-screen, no System Link support, and it's only two-player co-operative. There is no adversarial multiplayer, because developer Pandemic didn't want to pit soldiers against each other, or so the story goes. In any case, if you don't have Xbox Live, you may want it. Yeah, co-op is that good.

The co-op is not a special new mode, instead it's simply the single-player campaign. The difference is that in single-player, you have to switch between controlling Alpha and Bravo teams. With co-op, each player controls one team and you must talk through your Voice Communicators in order to co-ordinate your movements. I'll hit on that a lot more in a little bit, but for now I want to make sure you understand how the multiplayer functions, because it really hasn't been discussed much to this point.

Co-op play isn't a mode you have to enter separately from the single-player campaign. In fact, so long as you are logged onto Xbox Live while playing alone, you can have someone join you in the middle of a mission. On the same note, if someone drops while playing cooperatively, you can continue from that exact same point alone and they can rejoin later or someone else can come in. The chapters that are available for play depend on what the host has unlocked. Or you can go into someone's replay, which is a whole other level of cool.

Play It Again Sam
When I first saw a "trade" option when I was online I wondered if this was some sort of cool new clan symbol-type Xbox Live 3.0 features. That's not it, though. Instead, you can trade replays of your game. Sounds lame until you learn what replays actually are. At any time you can save a replay and one is always saved when you complete a mission. Playing a replay offers no new camera angles or anything, but you can jump into a replay at any time and continue the mission from that point with no additional loading. Pause the game, choose to jump in, and when you unpause, you are in control.

This allows you to take control of a mission right before you made that tactical error and got half of your men killed. This is usable both online and off. In fact, it's really a bit misleading to think of Full Spectrum Warrior as having an online mode. Yes, you must have Xbox Live and be connected to the Internet, but in the same way Project Gotham Racing 2 offered real-time online scoreboards and ghosts without interrupting the flow of the single-player game, Full Spectrum Warrior allows you to easily hop between co-op and single player. Other important Xbox Live features are included, with Live Aware available and Downloadable Content expected within the first few months of release.

So enough with all this talk of how to get into co-op, turn the page to read about the coolness that is Full Spectrum Warrior cooperative play.