FPS video game recreates mission to kill Osama bin Laden

Developer Kuma Games has released an update to its first-person-shooter Kuma War 2, which is a series of playable recreations of real events in the War on Terror. It's arguably the most important one of them all: gamers can now kill Osama bin Laden, just like the US Navy SEAL Team Six did on May 2, 2011.

The update to the game, which is an online multiplayer game only (there is no single player component), is number 107 and is likely the final one. It isn't supposed to have the best graphics or be the most realistic, but Kuma Games does take pride in the research it put into creating it. The company describes the mission as follows:

After months of surveillance and growing amounts of Intel, 79 Navy SEALs aboard two US Black Hawks and two more Chinooks cross into Pakistan under the cloak of darkness. The commandos quickly breech a secret compound, one designed for defense and manned by al Qaeda killers. In forty minutes and a rain of hot lead, a decades-long, worldwide manhunt for Osama Bin Laden will be ended... by you.

In the update, Kuma Games has recreated a map based on the assault on bin Laden's Abbottabad, Pakistan compound. Just as with any other episode in the series, the mission has players automatically assigned to one of the two teams. In this case, it's either the US Navy SEALS, tasked with killing bin Laden and recovering the body, or bin Laden defenders, who have to save the terrorist from harm by eliminating all opposing players.

The first team must also find critical intelligence to "end Al-Qaida" and destroy the downed US helicopter in the compound. All but one of the defenders on the second team in the game start out unarmed, but the compound is full of easy to find weapons. A player cannot control bin Laden directly; he is played by the computer, though the AI isn't particularly good. In the video above, there is only one player in the game, so it's just him versus bin Laden.

"We are sticking to our retelling of real-world events, and that means a lot of reading and research, as well as talking with sources so we can get it right," Mike Thompson, project lead, told Kotaku. "It's not fun telling an artist to start a model over after an all-nighter because someone found a mysterious tail rotor, but that's what we do to get the job done."

"At Kuma, we are very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day," Kuma Games CEO Keith Halper told Forbes. "We hope that by telling their stories with such a powerful medium that we enable the American public to gain a better appreciation of the conflicts and the dangers they face."