The game was designed as a training aide for US infantry squad leaders. It is at its core a lesson in flanking maneuvers. That is, using two teams to strategically hold enemies in position, use coverfire and clever movement to attack them from a position where they don't have adequate protection, or where your team has a better shot.
In this respect the game is fantastic. It employs very advanced AI based on the proper military procedures, and intelligent enemy AI that notices your attempts to flank and retreats to a safer position. Interestingly enough if you give your troops a covering-fire command for a region and run another team in front of them they will not countermand the order and stop shooting. However they will if that area is designated as a target sector (this means that they aim in this area and automatically shoot at enemies). Another interesting feature is that if you give the order for a team to aim in a particular direction, they will not return fire if they are shot from behind. I guess that they are modelled as perfectly obediant soldiers for this game.
This brings in a major point about this game - it is not a shooter. Not once do you fire a single shot - the best you can do is choose their target sector or throw a grenade. The core gameplay revolves around moving from cover to cover, carefully inspecting the area, positioning team members to ensure that there are no blind spots and doing two team maneuvers to outwit the enemy. Obviously this is not for everyone, and personally I found it a bit overwhelming.
The game will feature LIVE multiplayer modes. At this stage it looks like 2 player co-op is on the cards, and perhaps a head to head mode as well. Other than that the rest is unconfirmed multiplayer wise.
The graphics are very impressive and the atmosphere is perfectly captured. That said it is a game based on urban warfare so there is only so much variation that they can have with respect to areas. There is a story in the missions, however it was mostly missing from the version we tried. The controls are really very intuitive, and managing all the commands for the 2 teams is not hard once you get into it. Overall the game seems to already exhibiting quite a bit of polish and should be a quality title upon release. It is scheduled for an April in the US, however there is no PAL date at present.
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