Lost Patrol

The Good
Maybe you were into all those Vietnam movies and TV series? I definitely was. Remember "Platoon", "Apocalypse now", and the TV show "Tour of Duty"? It looks like Ocean had a Vietnam movie marathon in their office and tried to capture the feel of those movies into a computer game.

And I have to say they did a pretty good job.

Just look at the screenshots and you'll have a fairly good impression on what the game looks like: While technically all you do most of the time is move your troops on a map, the movement itself is depicted by wonderfully drawn images, accompanied by a very good MOD. You can almost feel how weary your wounded soldiers are as they drag themselves through the jungle.

Worse than the soldiers' fatigue are the events that happen on their way: They're pinned down by snipers, encounter random patrols or have to make their way through minefields, each event played in a sub-game, and in a very unforgiving way, your soldiers quickly die one by die until your unit has been decimated.

The Bad
The game is a lot of fun - at first. But after a while, you've seen all the images, and you've seen them many times. The individual sub-games are very simple and cannot compare to other games that focus on that genre. An encounter with a lone soldier for example results in a streetfighter-like brawl - only that it is so much more simplistic than any pure streefighter-style fighting game.

And there's just not much to do. You move your troops, enjoy the pictures, get into one of the weak sub-games that you'll eventually grow tired of, and that's it. Unfortunately, that doesn't last that long.

The Bottom Line
I don't regret playing this game. I was dragged into it at first and it kept me playing for a while. However, you just lose the motivation soon, and since you can't save the game, you'll always end up playing the same thing again and again. The game is very hard (which I personally like - it makes the soldiers' situation more desperate), and you simply lose interest after some time.