People love to talk about games that are different. They tell everyone how they've never seen anything like them and how dramatically the face of gaming will be altered from hereon in. Forums swell and superlatives are exchanged, the immediacy of newness overwhelms.

It's remarkable how powerful such a good, original concept can be. The only thing more remarkable, in fact, is its fragility.

Full Spectrum Warrior began life as a US Army training tool for the simulation of urban tactical combat. With the emphasis purely on the application of strategy, the game engine offers no direct control whatsoever over individual movement. Movement and firing orders alone are issued by the player, the individual teams of soldiers taking care of the rest. Troops will engage targets according to their line of sight, automatically ducking behind their assigned cover and dropping to the ground if none is available. With two and sometimes three squads available, enemy units are typically overcome via precise combinations of suppressing fire and flanking manoeuvres, variously involving your small arsenal of grenades and rifles.

What surprises about this basic system is how suddenly enjoyable it is. The hurried scrambling of squads from one point of cover to the next is captivatingly realistic but at the same time easy to achieve. The movement cursor always tells you if your troops will be safe; move it to the edge of a wall, for example, and your squad will line up along it while the squad leader peers round the corner. There are varying types of ‘destructible cover’ such as cars, crates and sofas that provide similar but limited defence, as indicated by diminishing icons above your troops’ heads.

Initial impressions suggest FSW to be one of those titles that takes a simple toolset and applies it to a vast succession of variously challenging scenarios. Having completed the five training missions, one expects to be gradually eased into the lethal turmoil of a combat zone with all of its grey areas and unseen dangers. After a few missions, sadly, the game reveals itself to have somewhat lower aims.

It’s an encroaching suspicion as you play FSW that the game is offering nothing that wasn’t featured in training. Somewhere past the game’s halfway point this suspicion will have cemented into a massively disappointing reality. Enjoyable as they are, each enemy engagement is the same as either the one before or the one before that; the limited scope of the original training tool having been stretched rather than expanded. Take the ‘bounding’ order, for example, whereby troops aim themselves at on prescribed direction while edging towards another. In reality this would prevent the kind of ambush that could wipe out a squad of four in a heartbeat; in FSW it’s academic because that situation practically never occurs. Too much of this game is spent securing unexpectedly vacant locations, the ever-available GPS reducing whatever tension’s left to an overstretched routine.

It’s the efficient thrill found in distracting, surrounding and neutralizing a target that saves FSW from this near-disaster of overall design. Even the flaws of the engine itself are significantly (if arguably not sufficiently) overshadowed by the raw pleasures of using it; flaws that commonly involve a strict, omnipotent set of rules. An enemy can be stood a clear metre from his supposed cover but if, on ‘paper’, he’s protected then no amount of spent ammunition will so much as graze him. Furthermore, painstakingly orchestrated manoeuvres can become farcical when the intended target is accidentally plugged by mere suppressing fire. The list of such inconsistencies is long – enormous for a game with such modest scope; yet somehow when the game wins, it wins big enough to survive.

The presentation in FSW is always impressive. Character animations are both fluidic and authentic, each squad member conveying a uniquely fleshed-out personality. Never one for the kids, the game’s dialogue tirelessly flexes a vocabulary that would make Joe Pesci himself shed a humble tear – startling yet undeniably apt. These are mere children cast into the turgid fog of war, and not once does the game fail to portray it. While musically the game’s soundtrack is agonisingly repetitive, the symphony of ricochets, explosions and Doppler effects is ample compensation.

As an extension of the premise, Xbox Live support in FSW promises much but lacks the material with which to deliver. Enabling two players to share control of respective squads and communicate via headset, these are the bare bones of a potentially great co-operative title. Such a game, unfortunately, would require a great deal more meat than Pandemic have chosen to provide.

So we assume this to be an interesting yet tiresome, enjoyable yet flawed enigma of a game. Typically, however, something particularly interesting remains hidden up its sleeve; that US Army training tool exists, in its entirety, as a bonus extra.

Immediately apparent in the Army version are the concessions suffered by FSW along its path to mass-market release. With its ruthlessly applied laws of reality and complete disrespect for the sentiments of the gamer, this is more the experience initially assumed of the game. Civilians are scattered randomly, each with the potential to become hostile at the most inconvenient moment. Squad configurations can be customised while the general design of the six separate missions is far more open. Unfortunately, this was never a retail product and no effort has been put into bringing its presentation up to scratch; audio is crude, framerate unstable and the graphics are a mere prototype of the ‘final’ version. Nevertheless, this serves as a brutal parallel universe and would be a sensible direction for an inevitable sequel to take.

From the wreckage of its weak structure and thinly spread action, the auspicious concept of Full Spectrum Warrior emerges a damaged, substantially broken vessel. Its strengths, however, are such that only a fool would dismiss it at this juncture. What could have been a genre-smashing dark horse has instead become the tantalising suggestion of one; the developers have a noble fight on their hands.