REVIEW Game lets players relive missions

There's no excuse for how bad this game is.
By JOHN GAUDIOSI
SPECIAL TO WASHINGTON POST
True-to-history war games -- whether they're set in the '40s, like Activision's "Call of Duty," or the '60s, like Electronic Arts' "Battlefield: Vietnam" -- have conquered a sizable chunk of the video-game market. "Kuma/War," a new online-only, broadband-required game, takes things a step further by allowing its subscribers to relive actual missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots, often only weeks or months after they have occurred.
The service offers a free seven-day trial and then costs $10 a month, with two new missions released each month. The current selection includes "Uday and Qusay Hussein's Last Stand in Mosul," "Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan," "Samarra Bank Heist" and "Fallujah Police Station Raid." (The latest mission, however, re-creates the 1980 attempt to rescue the 53 American hostages in Iran.)
Not enough effort
New York-based Kuma touts the way its creation weaves real war footage, newspaper clippings and other current-events material into each pre-mission briefing. But the company doesn't seem to have put nearly as much effort into creating the game's environments and animating its action: Poor graphics, dimwitted artificial intelligence and such basic game-play failures as the inability to peek around corners in firefights combine to make "Kuma/War" frustrating and unrealistic. In a single-player mode, you lead a squad of four soldiers through hostile terrain, only to find that this hapless crew can't even file out of an alley or aim properly under the computer's direction.
The only way to complete a mission is to manage all your troops directly, switching control from one to the next as needed.
"Kuma/War"'s multi-player mode takes the horrible AI out of the picture but doesn't fix any of its other flaws. When games such as THQ's Full Spectrum Warrior and Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises offer edge-of-your-seat action and graphics just this side of CNN, there's no excuse for this kind of a shoddy job.
Those other games also don't suffer from "Kuma/War"'s inherent creepiness; seeing this developer try to cash in the latest developments in Iraq with a new mission leaves me queasy.
X"Kuma/War," for Windows 2000 or newer systems, is available for $9.99 per month at www.kumawar.com.