Desert Rats

Desert Rats is a game made by the wonderful company of ValuSoft. The game was released in 2002, on March 17th. Other games that were released this year were Battlefield 1942, Metroid Prime, GTA III and Morrowind.

It's a shooter in which you fire from a truck and you steer at the same time. The camera is focused from behind the truck so it's third-person. During the course of the game you have to complete various objectives. In the levels you play, you pick up various ammunition crates which contain both useful and non-useful items such as spoiled Wienerschnitzel and Nazi comics.

All of the levels take place in the deserts in Northern Africa where you'll try to push back the Nazi forces which are trying to get a hold of the continent. Unlike you see depicted in most films concerning this subject, the troops in this area are scarce on the Nazi-side and even more-so on the Allied side. Since they only send one truck with two guys in it to push back an entire Nazi regime. Another thing that's weird is that you have a superior that doesn't even accompany you when you go out on these missions. He only sits in the office and meets you at the end of a level. It seems as the superior has seen a lot of hardships in battle since he moves as smooth as a mannequin.

In this game most objectives you do are the same, simply seek and destroy missions and seeing as most enemy soldiers aren't really that difficult to deal with, mostly due to a lack of AI. This means that you'll only get stuck when the game is unclear about your objectives. Throughout the game, you'll receive different weapons as a reward.

The graphics aren't as horrible as most ValuSoft games and to be honest this game, for its time, looks rather well. If it only wouldn't have been butchered by the bad animation and lighting effects. For example the superior I just mentioned moves very stiff and in the third level you'll have to sneak past guard posts and the light they shed on the streets looks like it's been made by glass, or in other words, it's simply an object that you can drive through. The death animations or the lack of in some cases is what makes this game simply laughable. Enemy infantry only has three types of death animations in which they'll sometimes skip frames. Enemy tanks and armoured vehicles simply have no animation. They'll just catch fire and reduce to a heap of scrap metal.

The music in this game is pretty much only present at the menu screens, whilst playing the game you'll have no music at all so you'll be listening to the humming of your Jeep, which gets annoying. The sounds in this game also seem to be stock as there are no different sounds between bullets, the same sound gets repeated over and over again.

The cut-scenes in this game are the most horrible I've ever seen. You'd think that editing a scene would be less hard than doing the entire animation of this game. Yet they still manage to fuck it up.

All in all, this game isn't that bad and some people seem to like it, although I've seen some ridiculous reviews giving this game way too much credit. It might be fun for a few hours, playing with a friend makes it more bearable as one player can shoot whilst the other one drives. You might consider buying this game if you're really bored, but I would only get it at bargain prices.
(The video footage has been shot by both Doofey and Gurt while they were playing together)