Six Days in Fallujah Preview

Six Days in Fallujah is a tactical multiplayer FPS from Highwire Games set during the Iraq War. Originally a passion project by the development team of Close Combat: First to Fight, the title has passed around development teams for so long (with a controversy stirred up by the media) that some believed it would never see the light of day... until now.

When booting up the game for the first time, you’re introduced to a short documentary explaining the events leading up to the second battle of Fallujah. Alongside archive footage accompanied by a voiceover are accounts from US Marine Corp. members, Iraqi veterans, and journalists who were involved in the urban conflict. For the older audience, the doco is styled similarly to the explanations you’d get at the beginning of 2000s Call of Duty/Medal of Honor missions.

On release, Six Days in Fallujah only has its multiplayer mode — titled Fireteam Missions — open to play, with Campaign and others locked. Jumping into a lobby, I only had to wait for an extended amount of time once, with the average waiting time around 30 seconds to a minute. Once you have a team of four, you can begin a mission.

After a loading scene with stills and quotes from the opening video, you’re then thrown into a cutscene describing the objective through radio communications. Every mission consists of a map of procedurally generated residential blocks with a main objective to follow. For example, helicopters scouting the city fear a section of buildings may be a prime location for an anti-air attack, so you’re given the orders to secure the area of insurgents and make a clear pathway.

As a team, to properly complete a mission, communication and cooperation is a must, with players rushing and/or taking on a lone wolf personality leading to their predictable demise. A main aspect of each mission is entering dimly-lit buildings to ‘clear’. Armed with a flashlight attached to your main and sidearm, you work to search each nook and cranny for Al-Qaeda fighters that are waiting for you to turn the corner. And to give Highwire Games some credit, combat and firefights are violent, not in the sense of gushing blood and body parts flying off, but the moments when fired upon, and you return fire until you see a cloud of red puff out of a human-shaped figure put me on my arse the first time it happened.

Which leads to the dangers of enemy AI and environmental traps left for you to unfortunately trigger. As the game has you fight a militia that has bunkered into a city, you can get attacked at any time from anywhere. Enemy AI will act on the sounds you make (talking and firing your weapons) and will investigate your location, including instances of groups or individual combatants ambushing you at opportune times. To express a sense of realism in conflict, environmental dangers like IEDs in rooms and trucks, or snipers will (for a lack of better words) hinder your progress; however, the tell-tale sound of beeping or a round swizzing past your ear will signal you to act accordingly and get away from the area. In certain missions, you will have to combat mortar attacks, with several of my playthroughs ending with me left in spectator mode. However, in most cases, we (the team I was with) could snipe the mortar teams without any issues.

Not if, but when you get hit, you have to stay still and enter a short animation of your character checking the wound. If severe enough, you automatically put on a bandage, but you only have one per person. If at any point you lose a team member, an APC that enters the map with you will give you one chance to redeploy downed players as well as rearm spent ammunition.

Depending on if you complete the mission, you get a complication screen and enter another, where you do the same thing but with different obstacles awaiting you. From all the rounds I’ve played with different kinds of players — a mix of hard-core mil-sim, casual, and players who mistook the game to be like modern shooters — at least one person was logging off to do something else. Whether it was due to them not liking the game or the gameplay draining your concentration and endurance to constantly pay attention to your surroundings as the game only has a compass and inventory you have strapped to your body on your HUD.

Six Days in Fallujah replaces the common minimap with your basic perceptual awareness. To bring the game’s world to life, you can hear pretty much everything when inside buildings as voices echo, including yours. If quiet enough, you will hear footsteps, Iraqi voices calling out to other fighters in the area, and distant explosions. With the help of a nosy insurgent, your team can get the drop on them. However, if outside, you don’t see or hear as well, leading to you sometimes getting jumped.

As said before, Six Days in Fallujah is a game of quick reflexes and slow movements as you move inside structures, as well as keeping possible entry points in sight of you at all times. So, the game’s controls are quite tight, but not so tight that you can’t swing your rifle’s barrel and open fire into a dark room. Thrown grenades have the appropriate physics, with the shrapnel from the explosive doing greater damage than the blast itself, but the animation of throwing a grenade from the third party’s perspective looks a little scuffed; for an instant, the model looks like it’s folding into itself.

For what it wants to and perceives itself to be, to what it is in Early Access, Six Days in Fallujah is an FPS that represents a part of American and Iraqi history with (at this stage) an emphasis on the American side of the war. The game does state that the Iraqi National Army did help US Forces in the real-life operation, therefore, future updates could include missions where you play the war in their perspective. Not to express my opinion of the game as parts are not open for play, I will be interested in playing its campaign when finished.