PC – Men of War Review
In the already crowded field of World War II real-time strategy games, new contenders have to provide something special to distinguish themselves. In order to achieve this, game developers must experiment and push beyond the ordinary, creating games that give us new reasons to revisit WWII again and again. Men of War succeeds at carving a niche within the genre by delivering an epic campaign full of historical detail, plus the ability to jump into your units with a third-person “direct control” mode. Furthermore, Men of War forgoes base building so that you can focus on tactics. These elements combine to produce an experience steeped in history and rich in detail that will reward anyone looking for a challenging new twist on the genre.
Men of War is a complex and difficult game, and as such it can be tough to get into. The first mission, which is the closest thing the game has to a tutorial, only teaches you a few basic commands. After that, you’ll get some help from the interface, such as the ghostly outlines that show where your troops can take cover and the occasional tool tip that flashes by, but that’s about it. This can be problematic when a mission asks you, for example, to booby-trap enemy vehicles or hide dead bodies but gives you no clue as how you do so. Unorthodox controls are common in Men of War, so even relatively simple actions like dividing your units into numbered control groups might prove elusive if you don’t take the time to read the instruction manual. The default control scheme uses only the left mouse button for movement, unit selection, and attack and can be tough to learn. Thankfully, you can switch to the more traditional RTS mouse setup in the game options if you prefer.
The gameplay in Men of War is engaging and varied. The single-player game is a set of three campaigns. First is the lengthy Russian campaign, which follows two friends in the Red Army who participate in a wide variety of early war missions, such as evacuating Soviet factories and defending the city of Sevastopol. It’s truly refreshing to play a WWII game that doesn’t take you through the overused battlegrounds of Normandy and Stalingrad, preferring instead to deliver new challenges from the lesser-thumbed pages of history, and, perhaps because Men of War’s developers are Ukrainian, they deliver a seemingly thorough and authentic depiction of the war from the Soviet perspective. It’s no surprise, then, that the developers played favorites with the Soviet campaign and made the German and American campaigns, which focus on the fighting in North Africa, about half its length. However, the shorter campaigns are anything but short, clocking in at about eight hours apiece, which puts the full single-player experience at 30-plus hours.
Part of the explanation for the game’s long play time is its grueling difficulty; the rest it owes to a diverse array of long, involved, and realistic missions. Overall mission objectives go well beyond your typical “annihilate the enemy” fare and range from buying time for workers evacuating factory equipment to helping a small team of partisans stir up trouble behind enemy lines. In addition, you’ll find a wide variety of tasks to accomplish within each mission. For instance, in the Tobruk level, you must push enemies out of their forward defenses, double back to remove mines and tank traps, fight to get your artillery to the coast, blow up several transports and a dilapidated battleship, swing around to take out a fortress behind your lines, and then send five men through an underground tunnel to seize control of British fuel supplies. With so many objectives to tackle, you’ll often spend 90 minutes or more on a single mission–hours if it’s a particularly difficult one–and at the mission’s conclusion, you’ll be able to enjoy a well-earned sense of achievement.
Men of War’s most distinctive feature is the ability to take direct control of one of your units. This lets you control the unit with your keyboard and mouse like in a third-person action game. Although you’ll need to directly control an infantryman in certain circumstances (such as shooting out enemy spotlights on a stealth mission), tanks are by far the most fun. While driving a tank, you can alternate between machine gun and main gun firing modes at will, and given that all buildings are destructible, you can, for instance, flatten a house filled with enemy infantry and then cackle maniacally as you pepper the fleeing survivors with your machine gun. Of course, playing with tanks is fun no matter which mode you’re in, especially if you love seeing numerous real-world models depicted with historical accuracy. For example, tank enthusiasts will be wowed by how many different models of the Soviet T-34 tank are represented.
As if directly controlling units, finding cover for your infantry, and working toward your objectives aren’t enough, Men of War has an additional responsibility in store for you: Limited ammo. In the event that any of your guys run out of bullets, you’ll need to search corpses and supply creates for more. Additionally, looting corpses will garner you all sorts of items to augment your troops’ effectiveness. Although there is a certain engrossing realism to the fact that your soldiers can equip any dropped gun, helmet, or grenade that they find, micromanaging your squad’s inventory, and looting and equipping items, can become overwhelming. Regardless, you will still experience a profound feeling of accomplishment whenever your motley crew of units scavenges enough enemy supplies to barely make it through a mission.
Multiplayer in Men of War supports up to 16 players in both LAN and online matches and there are seven different game types to choose from that consist of variations on four basic themes. Given that there are no enemy bases to destroy, multiplayer matches are decided by points. Depending on the game type, those points can be earned by controlling areas of the map; by towing a randomly placed cargo wagon to your base, or simply by killing as many enemies as possible. Furthermore, you can play through the campaigns cooperatively with a friend, which is definitely a welcome addition. Curiously absent is any kind of skirmish mode for playing against computer opponents, which is unfortunate given that versions of the game from different territories aren’t always compatible with each other which can make opponents difficult to find.
Men of War’s graphics and audio are nothing special, although the sound effects are good enough that you can distinguish noises as subtle as an enemy soldier crawling through the grass to throw an antitank grenade. The music is repetitive and becomes annoying due to the prolonged nature of the missions. Furthermore, the pathetic English-language voice acting, when combined with awkward character animations, makes for some unintentionally hilarious cutscenes that don’t mesh with the game’s otherwise gritty mood. One nice thing about the visuals is the inclusion of some greenery, in contrast to the traditional WWII palate of dirt brown and rubble gray. Overall, though, the graphics don’t compare too favorably with recent RTS games.
From the direct-control feature to the lovingly replicated historical vehicles, Men of War is full of well-crafted details that should make it especially appealing to history buffs. The steep learning curve alone will be enough to keep some players from enjoying everything that Men of War has to offer, but the reward for perseverance is a WWII campaign experience like no other game on the market.
Editor’s Note: The preceding review replaces the Men of War review that was originally posted on GameSpot, which was found to contain a number of factual inaccuracies. We regret the error.
PC – Codename Panzers: Cold War Review
While Germany’s estimable Panzer tanks may have gone the way of the dodo at the end of World War II, that little fact doesn’t seem to matter much to InnoGlow (formerly Stormregion). The developer has pushed history under the bus with Codename Panzers: Cold War, the third release in the series of real-time strategy games and the first to take the franchise beyond the war that gave us the A-bomb and the Andrews Sisters. But an offbeat name is the least of the problems that gamers have to deal with here. Formulaic design and tactical limitations make the game a mostly frustrating experience, even if you couldn’t care less about the historical accuracy of the game’s title.
Veterans of either of the two previous Codename Panzers games won’t find many surprises here, as the game is a straight-up rehash of the 2002 and 2004 predecessors. The only differences are in the storyline, which has been moved forward a few years. Instead of once more refighting the Second World War on those oh-so-familiar battlefields, you now scrap it up through an alternate-history Cold War. In this reality, the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1949 turns into a hot war. Sooner than you can say do svidaniya to the uneasy peace that has held since 1945, Soviet troops and tanks are rolling into West Germany, and World War III is under way. The four-chapter solo campaign features slices of this conflict from across central Europe. You first guide Yank NATO troops under Lt. Douglas Kirkland and then take charge of forces under the command of German WWII veteran Hans Von Groebel. Two- to eight-man multiplayer is also offered via GameSpy online and LAN, with game modes such as team deathmatch and domination.
Gameplay also sticks close to the franchise essentials. Battles remain fairly small-scale, especially in comparison to a typical RTS game, where dozens if not hundreds of units face off in battles. Here, you generally control no more than a handful of tanks, companies of soldiers, and APCs at a time, along with a few special locations, such as helicopter pads where you order reinforcements and medical tents that can mass-heal troops. This keeps things simple, making the game ideal for a beginner RTS gamer or an old hand who likes to play something straightforward every now and then. Difficulty levels support this, too. Easy is actually easy, to the point where you can breeze through missions without losing more than one or two units, while hard and ultra are murderously challenging. This is a welcome change from many other WWII-era RTS games, which seem to delight in punishing gamers with insane difficulty even on the easiest settings.
But it all plays out way too formulaically. Campaign missions offer cliched WWII RTS objectives, such as protecting allied convoys, destroying bases, defending locations for set periods of time, and so forth. Settings also include a lot of old standards, such as rustic villages, railway yards, and rainy forests. Unit selection is limited. You generally have just a few choices to make when loading up for a mission. Mostly, you get only the basics. So your choices are limited to troops like SMG squads, bazooka teams, and mine-clearing engineers, and a few types of tanks with various weaponry and armor. Units can be tricked out with tweaks like AA guns and flamethrowers, although there isn’t much in the way of customization. There is little room to experiment with unit deployment, anyway. Most levels involve direct assaults up roads or pathways. Every time you need to use a particular unit’s special ability, it’s glaringly obvious what you need to do. If, for example, you receive an emergency airdrop of engineers, you know right away that there must be a minefield nearby that they need to sweep.
Lack of choice keeps everything straight and to the point, although this also means that you start experiencing deja vu after just a few scenarios due to all the repetition. All you really have to learn is the importance of healing and repairing. If you back up frontline assault troops with a squad of medics, you have instant healing on demand during battles. If you send out an APC or two with every tank column, you can repair damage dealt to your armor on the fly. There are limits to how much can be fixed up, of course, but the repairing/healing range is so extreme that you can situate medics and APCs well behind the fray and still provide loads of support to the poor suckers taking direct fire. This almost gives the game a sci-fi vibe, because it seems absurd that assistance can be rendered from such a long way off in battles taking place during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Healing and repairing appear to be immediately transported to units in need, courtesy of crosses and metal plates that fly through the air between units. It looks like they’re beaming the help over, which doesn’t give the game much of a WWII or Cold War feel.
Visuals and sound provide more atmosphere, albeit at a price. This is a big-time performance pig, even when you’re running the game with one of the most powerful video cards on the planet. While missions are real lookers, with great fire and smoke special effects and tons of detail in unit and building explosions, all of these goodies routinely drop the frame rate into the single digits even on a video card like a top-of-the-line 4870 X2. At least the frame rate never gets so bad that the action stutters. Missions are always playable, although in a slo-mo fashion. So this can be lived with, if you have a killer rig. Playing the game with a system that meets only the base system requirements probably wouldn’t be a smart idea. Audio is also impressive, due to a lot of bombast that makes combat seem chaotic even when you’ve got just a couple of squads shooting it out onscreen. The only annoyance here is that too many people talk at the same time during battles. Sure, this is more realistic than one guy piping up for an entire battalion and giving an order acknowledgment. But having a dozen soldiers scream, groan, yell threats, make smart-aleck quips, and say yessir at the same time doesn’t seem like much of an improvement.
Panzers may roll on into the 1950s in Codename Panzers: Cold War, but the game itself too often grinds to a halt thanks to a reliance on simplicity that makes it too predictable. Only the alternative-history angle is of any real interest and solely to better-dead-than-red types who think we should have fought the commies right away instead of waiting four decades for them to implode economically.
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