The Wargamer

It was love at first sight. It took me about five minutes from the time when I first beat the Soldiers: Heroes of World War II demo to the time when I was scouring eBay for a copy of the full game. Since then it's been mainly the same process- someone puts out a new game in the Soldiers mold, I buy it immediately, I beat every mission several times, I play online for months on end, and I keep close tabs on how far along the next game is. I'm addicted.

So what is this formula? Men of War, like Faces of War and Soldiers before it, is a real-time tactical World War II game. Players are asked to take control of a few squads of soldiers and complete varied objectives across fully-destructible maps set in different theaters of the Second World War. God is in the details though, and this game's main draw has always been the attention they allow the player to pay to the 'little' things. One of the ways in which the player can do this is via 'direct control,' or taking a single soldier and moving him around the map with the arrow keys and aiming his gun with the mouse. When you can't rely on the squad AI (normally competent enough) to make that grenade-toss over that perimeter wall to blow that tank sky-high, you can click on the soldier yourself, hold ctrl, nudge him up to the wall, aim his grenade right at the engine, and let it fly.

The same thing goes for artillery pieces, armored cars, bikes, jeeps, and trucks. And even buildings, walls, trees and rocks obey physical laws. Driving a tank into a house and poking its barrel out of one of the windows allows you to hide from enemies and also renders their first few shots at your vehicle impotent. Setting a building on fire forces everybody inside to come screaming out the front door. Knocking buildings apart can kill infantry standing nearby, if they can't dodge the balcony coming down on their heads. By the end of a fiercely-fought engagement, the entire level is a cratered mess dotted with blackened metal and rubble. And the best part is that the player gets to watch all of that destruction happen in glorious real-time, bullet by bullet and shell by shell.

It's not just hand weapons that are available for commandeering and repurposing. Every single vehicle, stationary MG and artillery piece can be destroyed, repaired, re-crewed, and turned against the enemy if necessary. Of course, there comes a time when even the most skilled mechanic cannot salvage something- for instance, if a tank's turret is lying a few meters away from its chassis upside-down, having been blown clear by an 88. But if a track has simply come off or if an armor plate or two has been buckled and pierced, any soldier with a repair kit and some time can return the tank to operational status. Since many of the scenarios in Men of War place vast enemy forces in front of a relatively small band of player-controlled troops, taking advantage of this system is the hallmark of a resourceful commander.

The German campaign begins with the paratrooper invasion of Crete, and then follows the Afrika Korps back and forth across North Africa, and culminates in a furious, to-the-last-man base defense mission at night against hordes of allied tanks and infantry. The Allied campaign covers the same ground, beginning with the American invasion of French-occupied Algeria.

The campaigns overall are very well-done, from a balance and from a content perspective. Firstly, the player never really encounters a truly impossible situation. You'll definitely feel stonewalled at times, but since the scenarios are very non-linear and the game is so rich with detail, players are can always find another way around whatever obstacle is in their way. Secondly, there is a lot here to play. Considering the game's somewhat lowered price point ($40 on Gamersgate), the fact that I've already squeezed twenty hours out of it (and have only beaten half the campaigns, if that) is fantastic.

The only real sticking point with the single-player content is the voice acting. Some people might complain about it, but it's so weirdly terrible that it warps back around to being something that I actually look forward to at the end of a level. I don't know where they find people with voices like these.

Faces of War, the preceding game in this series, had the misfortune of running on a rather inefficient graphics engine. Slowdown was the watchword for any game lasting longer than thirty minutes, and the issue, despite patching, was never really resolved. Men of War takes care of this problem - it ran impeccably on my rig except for the rare times that a plane crashed into a row of tanks and a fuel storage facility at the same time.

In case you haven't looked at the screens yet, let me be the first to tell you that Men of War looks pretty good. The game shows itself off, too, as the camera can either sit high up above the battlefield or zoom down to the level where you can examine the buttons on uniforms. Explosion effects, understandably crucial to a wargame with pyrotechnics like these, are really a treat, and even just rolling through an empty desert or a Russian village is an experience made easy on the eyes by the game's graphical fidelity.

Sound (voice acting aside) is really exceptional. Not only is the music good (particularly during stealth missions) but the effects as well. Good sound effects (shells deflecting, bullets hitting the dirt) are a big part of the immediate, nuanced kind of feedback which is so critical to decision-making and enjoyment in this game.