The People’s Liberation Army-developed game Glorious Mission kicked up quite a fuss a few years back when a trailer appeared to show that the American military might be playing the role of enemy in the game. It has been a long time since then, though, and now that the game has finally been released to the public, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at the single-player campaign and see how the game turned out.
Note that I do mean a look. Call it paranoid if you’d like, but I’m not all that comfortable with the idea of installing software developed by the Chinese military on PC, so to get a look at the game, I turned to Youku videos like this one that show players working their way through each level. (Lest I be accused of bias, let it be known that I wouldn’t install software developed by the US military on my computer either).
From what I can see, the game looks pretty good most of the time, which shouldn’t be a surprise as it’s run on the latest version of the Unreal Engine. While it certainly doesn’t meet the graphic standards of Western standouts like Battlefield 3, it’s a decent looking modern FPS. Call of Duty fans would feel right at home with these graphics.
In fact, Call of Duty fans would feel right at home with just about every aspect of Glorious Mission, because the game shares an awful lot with the recent entries in that series. The levels in Glorious Mission are varied and full of scripted events — plane flyovers, big explosions, etc. — but the game shunts players down narrow corridors without giving them any freedom to approach situations tactically. In the game’s first level, after a brief amphibious landing, players follow a more or less direct line through narrow trenches. In another level, after some stationary sniping, players are pushed through a narrow cave. In still another, players work their way up a fenced path.
The similarities don’t end there. Glorious Mission features a regenerating health system that will be familiar to Call of Duty and Halo players — i.e. the duck-behind-that-rock-for-a-few-seconds-and-your-gunshot-wound-will-heal-itself system — iron sights-heavy gunplay, slow-motion door breaches, the works. None of this is a bad thing necessarily, and Glorious Mission is far from the only Call of Duty copycat out there, but it’s definitely worth pointing out. Having played a few Call of Duty games, I had numerous deja vu moments while watching Glorious Mission.
There are definitely some downsides to the game, though. The enemy AI appears to be just a step or two short of brain dead, and as a result the game looks pretty easy. I watched five full level play-throughs (out of eight total levels in the game) as well of bits of others, and never saw the player character killed, or even seriously injured. Perhaps I was just watching an expert play, but it didn’t seem that way, and when the player did get shot, it seemed to have virtually no impact whatsoever. The game does have three difficulty settings, but even so, it’s hard to imagine the PLA is really using this game for training. If it is, I hope someone is also reminding Chinese soldiers that in real life, bullet wounds don’t heal themselves.
Friendly AI doesn’t appear to be much better. In the play-throughs I watched, NPC teammates repeatedly stepped in front of the player as he was firing with the result that several took bullets to the face. Amazingly, they didn’t seem to mind this and there was no shouting about friendly fire.
There are plenty of other minor gripes to make, but all in all, Glorious Mission looks like a competent if unoriginal shooter, and for players who want to put themselves in the shoes of the PLA, it is certainly the most realistic option out there. As for the anti-American accusations, they seem to have been quite overblown (no surprise there). Enemies are just called “enemies” and you won’t see any flags or other identifying marks in the game as far as I can tell. There’s not a lot of story, and what is there is pretty vague, but from everything I saw, this game is far more tame than any of the Western games where the PLA is the enemy.
The game also features co-op and multiplayer, which I hope to take a look at in a later post.
The post A Look at “Glorious Mission,” China’s Military-Produced Call of Duty Clone appeared first on Tech in Asia.