Author - Jerry Paxton

Victura and Highwire Games today announced their upcoming first-person tactical shooter Six Days in Fallujah will release on June 22, 2023, through Steam’s Early Access program. The game will launch with four co-operative four-player missions. These missions are set in urban maps that are generated procedurally every time the game is played to recreate the uncertainty of combat along with unlimited replayability.

Six Days in Fallujah is a highly realistic first-person tactical shooter developed with help from more than 100 Marines and Soldiers who served in the Second Battle of Fallujah, as well as more than two dozen Iraqi civilians and soldiers. Based on true stories from the battle, Six Days requires players to overcome real-world scenarios with their fire team by using real-life military tactics.

“The way we play video games right now is not how people fight in real life,” says Sgt. Eddie Garcia, a Marine who was wounded during the Second Battle of Fallujah. “Six Days in Fallujah requires tactics and teamwork that are more like real combat than any other game I’ve played.”

Six Days introduces many new technologies that make combat more realistic:

• Procedural Architecture re-shapes the inside and outside of every building each time the game is played. Just like the real battle, players never know what to expect.
• Block-scale AI is a dramatic new approach to AI based on insurgent tactics from the battle. Unlike games in which AI is constrained to move in very small areas, AI enemies in Six Days can go anywhere on the battlefield, and they will stalk, flank, and ambush players while coordinating their attacks with each other and luring players into difficult situations.
• Global Dynamic Lighting simulates real weather and lighting effects dynamically, so visibility shapes gameplay, especially as players move between blindingly bright outdoors and terrifyingly dark indoors. Realistic smoke, dust, and weather effects complicate visibility in unpredictable ways.
• Tactical Indoor/Outdoor Sandbox. Players — and their AI enemies — are free to approach challenges from any direction in Six Days in Fallujah. Rather than breaching a house through a front door, for example, players might choose to climb to a rooftop, or cross rooftops on wooden planks, to attack from the top down.

In Early Access, Six Days in Fallujah will focus initially on the experiences of US Marine fireteams on the first day of the battle. As Early Access develops, players can also choose to play cooperatively as special operations or Iraqi soldiers fighting alongside coalition forces, and players will begin to encounter civilians as the battle progresses. Victura also plans to release additional co-operative missions, as well as story campaign missions recreating real stories from the Second Battle of Fallujah from the perspective of both coalition forces and Iraqi civilians.

The Second Battle of Fallujah began in November 2004 after Al Qaeda in Iraq seized control of the city of Fallujah. Six months later, Iraq’s prime minister ordered a military operation in which Iraqi soldiers fought alongside American and British forces to re-take the city. Within a few days it had become one of the world’s bloodiest battles in half a century.

Six Days in Fallujah began development 18 years ago, just months after the battle ended. Conceived by a Marine who was wounded during the battle, more than 100 Marines and Soldiers, along with more than two dozen Iraqis, have helped with its development. The game was canceled in 2009 by the game’s original publisher, Konami. Development restarted in 2017 when publisher, Victura, partnered with developer Highwire Games, a studio founded by many of the original Halo and Destiny leadership.

The PC version of Six Days in Fallujah will launch into Early Access on the Steam store on June 22, 2023 at a price of US$39.99. The full release of the game is expected to be available for both console and PC in 2024. More information about Six Days in Fallujah is available at www.sixdays.com. Six Days in Fallujah is also on Twitter (@VicturaGG), and YouTube.