War Is Hell—And Also, It’s A Video Game

An intense recreation of Haifa Street in Baghdad is just one of the many Kuma\War maps available

One Video Game Company’s Quest To Bring The War To Your PC

You’ve played all the latest war games. You’ve got all the tactics down for taking in the most frags per match. Maybe you’re even in a clan that gets together online and plays one of your favorite maps. But how close to reality is your favorite FPS? And is that really close enough?

Kuma Games doesn’t think so. The latest endeavor to come out of this New York City based studio is the Kuma\War series. This is a realistic and heavily researched shooter that puts you in the shoes (or rather, the boots) of actual soldiers, that have fought actual battles in the ongoing War on Terror. From hidden nuclear installations within Iran to covert operations to capture communist spies from North Korea, each of the ninety-plus episodes featured comes with its own highly detailed “intel pack” that gives the user info on a mission, descriptions of potential enemies, and even satellite imagery of the scene of operations. Hence, when you look around in the Haifa Street map that takes place in Baghdad, you’re looking at a highly accurate recreation of the street as it exists in Iraq.

The more recent addition, dubbed Kuma\War 2, takes advantage of the Source engine (used in Half-Life 2) which brings a whole new level of detail and realism to the scenarios. Where the original Kuma\War missions were third person shooters, the use of Source has allowed Kuma to personalize the series by putting the gamer in a first person perspective.

It is this concept of releasing games in a ‘series’ that really makes Kuma stand out as a game company. The concept of ‘episodic gaming’—that is, releasing titles on a schedule more resembling a TV sitcom than any game developer timetable—is something that Kuma has pioneered since its inception many years ago. By combining the episodic gaming ethos with current events, Kuma\War has become something of a media anomaly by giving the user the power to control highly important events occurring in the world—at least, through your PC, at any rate.

Kuma poses the question: What if our port security was to be compromised by terrorists?

Kuma\War, like all other Kuma FPS games, has a built-in multiplayer option as well as the single player ‘missions’. While the multiplayer option is quite similar to most other online shooters out there, Kuma has created a co-op mode that stays true to the realities of warfare more so than your average fragfest. In co-op, you work alongside your fellow human teammates, clearing AI driven enemies out of sections of a map. And it’s not as easy as you think! Cooperation (duh) and communication are key in this new take on online game play.

The amazing thing about single player mission turnaround is that missions are released not months after the event they are based on, but sometimes just a week after. The Haifa Street mission (see top screenshot) is an example of a mission that was completed barely a week after the event in question. So keep on your toes with military current events; today’s headline in CNN could be next week’s Kuma\War mission!

This series, as with all Kuma products, is available completely free through the downloadable Kuma Client. Those of you that are worried that Kuma is, in a sense, ‘war profiteering’ through the creation of Kuma\War can rest assured that nothing is further from the truth. No sponsor ads appear anywhere within the game, and (as stated above) there is no fee to play any of the missions.