Men of War Review

It is often said that history is written by the winners of wars; similarly, a blockbuster game can cause others to become lost and forgotten within its shadow, effectively rewriting the history of a particular genre. It's this effect which will cause most to assume at first glance that Men of War is trying to be Company of Heroes.

Men of War is in fact the second follow-up to Best Way's 2004 game Soldiers: Heroes of World War II and, like its predecessors, owes as much to the classic Commandos games as it does to the traditional RTS. Men of War continues the series' trend of WW2 strategy with 3 campaigns split between Russian, German and Allied missions along with a number of stand-alone levels.

The game shuns the traditional base-building gameplay, instead giving the player a limited number of units to complete the objectives; there are occasionally reinforcements provided during the course of a mission, but on the whole each unit is precious - the loss of a single unit can be enough to turn the tide of a battle.

Whilst there is no direct resource gathering to supervise, each unit has a finite supply of ammunition with replenishments available from looting the nearby corpses or the occasional supply crate. Likewise, vehicles must also be kept supplied with fuel - thankfully this can be siphoned from other vehicles rather than having to roam the countryside looking for a filling station.

Units themselves can be handled as squads or individual soldiers to allow greater control; the fidelity of movements can be increased further through the use of the ‘direct control' mode, which gives full keyboard control of a single unit. In practice direct control is best used for manoeuvring vehicles in tight spaces when you want to avoid knocking down walls or complex tasks which can't be achieved through the user interface, such as ‘cooking off' a grenade before throwing it into a crowded room.

It will not just be feeble walls crumbling beneath your tank tracks; pretty much every structure in the game can be knocked down or blown up and the subsequent wreckage used as makeshift cover. This is not without its issues however - in an interesting case of unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, I attempted to drive a tank through a building which had apparently been flagged as indestructible resulting in the tank being sent flying through the air and landing 30 feet away, on its roof! The pathfinding AI also has some inconsistencies with how it handles destructible structures - direct a tank to the other side of a wall and it will assume you want it to charge straight through, click the other side of a building and it will decide to drive around.

With debris quickly littering the landscape, leading to a battlefield looking very different at the end of a firefight to how it started, it is often necessary to keep troops on their toes and move around as new cover is created or existing cover destroyed - make no bones about it, soldiers left out in the open are as good as dead. Thankfully the game does make positioning troops in cover easier by showing silhouettes of where units will be facing when hovering the cursor over suitable cover.

The earlier games in the series were criticised in the gaming press for their difficulty and it would appear little has changed in this aspect. I wouldn't consider myself to be the best strategist in the world but I'm more than capable of holding my own against the AI in most other RTS games. That said, Men of War is challenging and frustrating at times. Largely the difficulty stems from the sheer weight of opposition forces and lack of friendly reinforcements, a state of affairs not helped by the frequent need to send a unit on a sacrificial run with an anti-tank grenade to take out approaching armour. The temporary nature of shelter also plays its part in adding to the challenge; many a time has a stray tank shell aimed at my first line of defence missed its intended target and inadvertently left units in my second line exposed or incapacitated. 

For those looking for a break from the AI, there is a multitude of multiplayer options available, ranging from King-of-the-hill style gameplay to free for all battles. There is also the ability to play the campaign missions co-operatively, however the lack of options to add AI to the multiplayer scenarios may reduce the longevity for those not wishing to play online once the main campaigns have been completed.

The realism of the gameplay is complemented perfectly by the graphics engine powering it all. The level of detail in both the models and the textures is impressive, and even with dynamic shadows and reflections enabled there was no noticeable slowdown. At the other end of the spectrum, the engine scales very well - my laptop was called upon to test some of the multiplayer aspects; it was able to handle the default settings and remained playable without any severe degradation in graphical quality.

All of this action is accompanied by a somewhat run-of-the-mill orchestral score which deserves little mention beyond the fact that it rather intermittent. Music is generally cued by scripted events throughout the missions, but the rest of the time the battlefield is eerily silent save for the sound of gunfire being exchanged and the occasional explosion. Ironically, the periods when there is no music seem more all the more poignant - whether it was a conscious decision by the developers to use music simply as punctuation, signifying the transition between phases of the battle, rather than playing constantly remains to be seen.

There are some occasional AI issues; turrets twitching rapidly, seemingly unable to decide which target to aim at next and units continuing to fire at corpses long after they've been killed. These minor niggles are unlikely to put anyone off this game, the difficulty level however may. It is unfortunate that an otherwise marvellous game is marred by such a restriction on accessibility.