The first couple of times I tried to play Six Days in Fallujah, I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. I’d take on a mission, head forth into a bombed-out urban sector, and within a few minutes, get shot repeatedly by attackers I never saw.
It turns out that this is exactly how Six Days is meant to work. It’s not a typical video game; it’s more like an urban combat simulator. It’s forced me to unlearn some habits I’ve developed over decades of playing less realistic games.
Six Days in Fallujah, currently in Steam Early Access ($39.99), is a cooperative multiplayer first-person shooter developed and published by two Seattle-area companies, Highwire Games and Victura.
First announced back in 2009, Six Days is a deliberate attempt to use the modern FPS as a template to create an interactive historical reenactment. Specifically, it’s meant to give players an idea of how it felt to be on the ground during the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, both as an American soldier and as a civilian from the city.
Its arrival on Steam Early Access marks a new chapter in a story that goes back almost 15 years. Six Days initially appeared as a project by the now-defunct Atomic Games with the Japanese company Konami attached as publisher. Upon its initial announcement, however, both anti-war advocates and veterans disliked the idea of turning the Second Battle of Fallujah into a video game, for any reason. Konami quickly dropped the game, which took Six Days off the industry radar for the better part of the next 12 years.
Six Days is more concerned with realism than any first-person shooter that I’ve played in maybe the last decade. Even games like Call of Duty, for all their fascination with modern military hardware, tend to be games first, with all the quality-of-life bonuses that fans have come to expect from their shooters over the years. For example, if someone opens fire on you in a modern shooter, its UI will probably show you which direction the bullets are coming from.
Six Days has no such concerns. In addition to little things like a minimalist UI, it features a realistic approach to both weapons and their relative level of danger. Get shot once, and you’ll need to withdraw to cover to try and patch yourself up. Get shot again after that, and you’re either dead or will need a nearby teammate’s help.
As a result, the game is pure paranoia fuel. Any doorway or window in Six Days’ recreation of Fallujah could hold an enemy with a machine gun. Opponents can stage ambushes, snipe you from blocks away, or drop mortar shells on your position with little or no warning. In a game, this would strike me as unfair, but this is supposed to be a war.
At this point in Six Days’ run in Early Access, the only playable content is its “fireteam missions,” a series of four rotating maps for up to four players that are set in various neighborhoods throughout Fallujah.
In addition, Six Days features an assortment of videos, made up from new and archive footage, that features testimony and stories from both American and Iraq veterans. The project was originally conceived by Eddie Garcia, a Marine who fought and was wounded at Fallujah, with the aim that “video games can help all of us understand real-world events in ways other media can’t.”
Personally, my biggest takeaway from Six Days is that I’d be a terrible Marine. This might be the most realistic first-person shooter I’ve played since some of the earlier Rainbow Sixes, and even that feels like a bad comparison. Just in terms of the sheer tension of the experience, Six Days is already in a class by itself.
The game is built around the expectation of close teamwork, where you’re meant to be able to depend on your squad to cover angles and watch your back. If you run off alone, or worse, try to Rambo your way through the conflict theater, you’ll end up dead in seconds. You’ll want to try to play with a regular crew if you intend to crack into Six Days, and to make sure you’ve all got microphones when you do.
At time of writing, however, Six Days is just a painfully realistic military shooter, set in a series of environments that are identical to any other bombed-out war zone from a recent video game. The fireteam missions are grueling and intense, with little room for failure, but they’re little more than a proof of concept compared to what Victura and Highwire have planned for the project.
Several earlier shooters like the Medal of Honor series have taken real pride in their historical accuracy and reproductions, but Six Days is breaking new ground here, by recreating a recent conflict from an unpopular war in living memory. The developers seem entirely aware and respectful of that, with testimony from real soldiers in every loading screen, but the campaign mode is what’s likely to sink or elevate Six Days in Fallujah.
