When I was nothing but a small boy, one of my mother’s favourite films was An Officer and a Gentleman. I personally wasn’t bothered by all the romance and smoochy nonsense, but the hero for me was the drill Sergeant, Sergeant Foley, brilliantly played by Lou Gossett Jnr. His foul mouth and the way he spoke to the recruits, whipping them into shape was an inspiration.
What this rambling introduction is leading to is that of Full Metal Sergeant from CarloC Games and PolyCrunch Games. You see, this promises to let me live out my fantasies of being a drill instructor, moulding young men into soldiers and so on and so forth. So, let’s see if it lives up to my hopes and dreams…
First off we will look at the presentation of the game, and here the news is mixed. It is yet another retro style affair, with your sergeant and your recruits depicted in-game as tiny piles of pixels. I wish I could be kinder, but that is what I’ve seen – tiny piles of pixels doing things. The base where we train our recruits is fairly simple, with four exercise sections to it, and we can change these sections around to suit the particular needs of our recruits. There are a couple of other screens to mention too and after the recruits have graduated, there is a mission screen, that looks like a map that you fill in, and a battle screen, where our piles of pixels shoot at other piles of enemy pixels. Again, the graphics are simple. But they work.
The sound is better, with our character, the sergeant, having a nice line in insults and running cadences. In fact, if you select him, he will actually answer you back, which is a nice touch. Training and gunfire noises are all present and correct too and so everything in terms of the Full Metal Sergeant audio works.
There’s not much in terms of narrative or story though, and what is there is simple – we are a drill sergeant and every 12 weeks we are given three new recruits to hone into lean, mean fighting machines. Our recruits turn up as out of shape civvies, and we have to get them to show us their war faces in a very short period of time. That’s pretty much it – after you have trained them, they head off for an actual mission, and then it is game over, start again. Short? Undoubtedly. Good? Well, that remains to written…
And so we get on to the actual gameplay, the guts of the game. Here the news is pretty good as Full Metal Sergeant is almost a roguelite; if our recruits are killed on the mission at the end of their training, we have to start again and try to do better. Each recruit has the possibility of having a flaw when they come to us – they can be introverted, lazy, and so on. Luckily we know a way to cure them of these flaws. In case you are in any doubt, Full Metal Sergeant does tell you how to cure the character flaws, and it is always done by drilling. Lazy people need strength training, for instance, and if a recruit is scared of water, we need to get them doing laps in the pool. Curing a recruit of his flaw gives Prestige, which is the in-game currency for buying new exercise equipment and for upgrading the existing stuff, so it is well worth doing.
When drilling the recruits, you have to keep an eye on what is happening, mostly as they are delicate little flowers. There are two stats to watch over – stamina and stress – attempting to keep one high while ensuring the other stays low. Can you guess which way round?
Each exercise included in Full Metal Sergeant will take stamina away and add to the stress level. And then there are two other options if things are going badly for your recruits – you can sit them in the guardhouse, which will recharge their batteries, or you can make them polish a cannon, which has the same effect, but to a lesser degree. Every so often an inspection will take place to make sure your recruits are still in good shape, and extra prestige can be earned on these visits.
Spending the prestige is also quite an important part of the game – we can buy new exercise yards in the Office, and these can be swapped each week to enable us to produce well rounded soldiers. There is also the opportunity to spend prestige on entering competitions against rival bases, where recruits will compete in running, swimming, boxing and even shooting against other recruits. These are not events that you can influence – you just need to make sure your troops are trained in the relevant areas to make them competitive. Those areas come in the form of Strength, Stamina, Melee and Shooting, with different exercises capable of increasing the stats of your troop. If you are really lucky, one exercise can increase two stats, such as the NoMans-Land equipment that you can buy. The running track is another good exercise for the squad, but it uses up all the weekly exercise points you get – two per recruit.
Once the 12 weeks are up, the troops graduate and are sent on a mission. This is a five stage affair, with each seeing your troops going through enemy territory to an objective, overcoming obstacles on the way. These can be firefights with enemy soldiers, encounters with different things (such as minefields or villages) and all the while, the supplies your troops carry are depleting. Once they have reached the objective, you can then choose to return or continue with the mission. Once the mission is finished (all five stages) that is game over, and you have to start again from scratch. Should your troops all perish (which is entirely possible as my guys seemed to find themselves in a minefield and were blown to pieces!), then again, you start all over again.
There’s no doubt that Full Metal Sergeant is an interesting game, but its big drawback is in its length. It doesn’t take long to figure out what you need to do to get your guys mission ready, and once they have accomplished their objectives, that’s it. There is no New Game + and little replayability – just start again. More end game content would be very welcome, however, for the relatively low asking price, there is fun to be had here.
