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Six Days in Fallujah revealed (PS3)

• By Sid Shuman
• April 08, 2009 11:48 AM PST
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The environments in Six Days in Fallujah are completely destructible. You can use explosives to breach walls, or bring down entire buildings.

Dark Corners of the Earth

Which brings us, finally, to the game. Intriguingly, Atomic Games describes Six Days in Fallujah as a "survival-horror game," a genre made famous by gooey zombie blasters such as Resident Evil 5 and Dead Space. But in Six Days in Fallujah, the fear comes not from the undead or the supernatural, but from the unpredictable, terrifying, and very real tactics employed by the insurgents that were scattered throughout Fallujah. "Many of the insurgents had no intention of leaving the city alive," Benito says. "So their entire mission might be to lie in wait, with a gun trained at a doorway, for days just waiting for a marine to pop his head in." For the marines, these scenarios represented a lethal case of Russian roulette. "They went door-to-door clearing houses, and most of the time the houses would be empty," Benito explains. "But every now and then, they would encounter a stunningly lethal situation...which, of course, rattled the marines psychologically." For Benito, giving players a taste of the horror, fear, and misery experienced by the real-life marines in the battle was a top priority. "In most modern military shooters, the tendency is to turn the volume up to 11 and keep it there," Benito says. "Our game turns it up to 12 at times, but you also need to dial it back down and establish a cadence."

As you fight house to house and street to street in the game, you'll quickly learn to fear open doorways (what the real-life marines came to call "fatal funnels") and enclosed spaces. And there are a lot of enclosed spaces in Fallujah, as the insurgents riddled the city with secret tunnels and bunkers, claustrophobic areas you'll have to explore and clear in the game with the help of your fire team. "These are scary places, with scary things happening inside of them," Benito adds. "In the game, you're plunging into the unknown, navigating through darkened interiors and 'surprises' left by the insurgency." Unease is a reoccurring theme in Six Days in Fallujah. "There will be times [during gameplay] when you're navigating through a room and it's strikingly quiet and eerie," Benito explains. "But you may see subtle cues, such as dust falling from the ceiling or a shadow that moves." More disturbing is a tactic pulled straight out of the real-life battle: some of the insurgents knew a few words of English and tried to lure marines into ambushes, a mechanic that is represented in the game. Benito elaborates: "You might hear a voice coming out of a darkened doorway whispering, 'Mister, mister, c'mere, c'mere.' Of course, the marine won't fall for that, but it gives a very eerie feeling to the environment."

In the real Battle of Fallujah, Marines often found themselves ambushed in doorways. In the game, you'll want to breach walls to surprise the attackers waiting inside.

Shaping the Battle

But from a gameplay perspective, Six Days in Fallujah's biggest ace in the hole may be on a purely technological level. According to the developers, the game's environments are 100 percent destructible and degradable thanks to a completely custom rendering engine. Fully destructible environments -- settings that collapse and explode realistically under bombs and bullets -- remain a massive technological hurdle for most game programmers. And though "destructible environments" have been hyped in games ranging from 2000's Red Faction (and Red Faction Guerrilla) to 2007's Battlefield Bad Company, the results have been limited and disappointing. Not so in Six Days to Fallujah, according the development team. "This engine gives us more destructive capability than we've seen in any game," Tamte interjects, "even games that aren't finished yet." According to the developers, destructible environments are critically important to telling the true story of the events in Fallujah, as the marines eventually learned to blow holes in houses (using C4, grenade launchers, air strikes and more) to surprise the insurgents waiting within. Referring to these moments as "combat puzzles," Tamte claims that the destructible environments "change literally every aspect of how you play this game." Though Six Days in Fallujah is not yet in playable form, the Tamte claims that "you can do everything from creating a new line of attack by blasting through a wall, to taking out a sniper by blowing up part of the building." According to Benito, the destructible environment adds so much to the gameplay that it's "frustrating" to go back to games like Call of Duty 4 or Gears of War 2.

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