Sometimes all it takes to create an experience that’s new and exciting is to take a base genre concept and apply it to the right place or situation to make it fly. In theory, the idea of tackling a time management game in the form of getting some recruits through boot camp successfully isn’t a bad one. The issue is that while Full Metal Sergeant seems to come out of the gate with a decent concept, in execution it’s sadly quite shallow and even with there not being much to it I still ran into a critical bug that locked things up.

Starting with what works, the core concept isn’t a bad one. You’ll be charged with a group of raw recruits who you’ll have 12 weeks to try to get into shape for battle. To accomplish that goal you’ll need to assign them to training tasks on a daily basis that will help move them in the right direction. For the sake of there being some variety, each has their own struggles in the form of physical or personal flaws that you’ll need to figure out how to remedy or at least try to compensate for by the end of basic training, in addition to assigning them a role they’ll fill based on their strengths. While you’ll start with a limited number of choices, by having your recruits participate in competitions and satisfying progress expectations you’ll accumulate points that you’ll then be able to use to acquire new training options.

To some degree, this all works well enough, and once you’ve gone through a run or two you should be able to apply what you’ve learned about the ins and outs of how things work to improve your outcomes. The problem is that aside from learning these quirks in how to get the best results there really isn’t much at all to the experience. I do somewhat wonder if one of the failings I think the game has is related, and that’s the fact that you’re given very little direction on how to manage their stats, so you’ll have to trial and error things, making critical mistakes that you’ll then start to work out what you should have been doing from. Either way, not everything you’re tasked with doing is intuitive as to how to do it properly, and mixing that fact with the lack of depth makes the experience a bit disappointing, especially if you then encounter a critical bug along the way.

The shame is that the idea here isn’t a bad one, it’s just a concept that needs far more meat on its bones to have any real appeal. Whether you could have mini games to get more involved in the various training exercises, or some other element that would bump up your direct level of investment in the fate of your recruits, the game is just missing that added dimension. Instead it ends up at the level of more simplistic time management sims that work perfectly fine on mobile devices, though I’d argue some of those I’ve played are more interesting and show quite a bit more depth than this does.