Men Of War
Mar 16, 2009 Summary: Men of War is a Real-Time Strategy game that takes place during the height of World War II. Intense battles span Europe and North Africa as gamers play as Soviet, Allied or German forces across 19 massive single-player missions. Men of War: Assault Squad was the first game in the Men of War series to not have a story based campaign. Assault Squad is instead geared more towards massive scale multiplayer battles, and is the first in the series to be based mainly on multiplayer.
This demanding World War II real-time strategy game delivers an epic campaign and a new take on tactical combat.
By Daniel Shannon on
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.
I'm just trying to pivot the camera around when I accidentally hit E. Suddenly, I'm looking over the shoulder of a squad leader with the US Marine Corps. His rifle is following my cursor and WASD moves him around. Men of War: Assault Squad 2 is an RTS—so what the hell is going on?
No matter: I spend the next gleeful minute headshotting advancing Japanese soldiers in this surprise third-person shooter mini-game. Later, I learn that this mode is called 'Direct Control,' and I can trigger it with any unit at any time. 'Accidentally discovering something awesome' will soon become a four-word summary of my time with Assault Squad 2. It's a deep, complex real-time strategy game set in various theaters of World War 2, with five distinct armies with their own multistage campaigns, hundreds of unique vehicles, dozens of personal weapons, melee combat, seasonal camouflage, fully destructible environments, and realistically modeled armor penetration.
Put together, these elements paint a tactical picture more chaotic and deeply realized than Company of Heroes 2 or Close Combat. On the downside, Assault Squad 2 isn't interested in teaching you much of anything, so your curriculum for self-education is vast.
Self-education takes time, so at this early stage I'm incompetent. My Marines are having a hell of a time taking this unnamed island back from the Japanese—even with my assistance in the form of a dead-shot sniper squad leader in Direct Control mode. They've held off a counterattack, and I see one soldier has a red ammo clip over his head. At that moment, I learn that soldiers can run out of ammo and that every soldier in the game has his own inventory system full of grenades, bandages, and entrenching equipment. Moments later another assault wave begins, all of my men run out of ammo, and everyone dies.
No mercy
Hours of experimentation later, I decide to make the jump to multiplayer. There are five multiplayer modes, but, true to form, the differences between their rulesets are never fully explained. The most interesting is Assault Zones Extreme, a jumbo-sized eight-on-eight version of the standard resource-capture game mode. In resource-capture modes, cash for troops accrues gradually, and each soldier type has a cooldown timer after recruitment. The shortest games are the one-on-one fights, which typically last only a few minutes and end with a decisive winner.
The town in my first match, a French village with a robust shipping and industrial neighborhood, seems completely empty. In a horror game, an empty rural village would be cliche, but in online RTS play, it's unbearably tense. My opponent is hiding. To say I'm wound a bit tight would be an understatement.
Minutes pass. My men have captured all three control points in the center of the small, one-versus-one map. Sweat beads on my forehead. I have every squad hunkered down behind cover, their guns trained on the foggy fields and dirt roads that the enemy should be marching down. My victory points climb to 50 percent, then to 70 percent. As I round 80 percent, my fear gives way to confusion. I pry my hand off the mouse to type into the global chat: “Hello?”
Men Of War Star Wars Mod
After a moment, a response comes through: “sorry I was afk lol.” Tanks and mortars and armored cars and machine guns and sniper teams light up my minimap, and my men start to die. The game is over. My Johnny-come-lately opponent has won, 100 points to 85. In retrospect, his late entry let him save up his resource points and devote them to powerful armor units. After I lost those control centers, I was in such a scramble to get them back that I tried to overwhelm my enemy with cheap infantry: a dumb mistake that cost me everything. His tardiness played so well, I can't help but wonder if he was really “afk lol,” or if it was a hideous trap.
Even after three hours of learning how to play, even with an 80-point handicap, I plummeted straight off the side of Assault Squad 2's pitiless learning curve. I should have been so mad at the game, but I wasn't. I wanted more. I wanted to learn the tricks and strategies that my opponent already knew: the secrets that would unlock the game.
Stockholm syndrome
Much later, I'm back in singleplayer. I've sent Japanese shock troops across most of an island against those corn-eating, American dogs. I've learned a lot over the last few days. I've learned how to resupply squads with a single click, how to rearrange and organize shattered units after an attack, and how to gain ground without exposing troops to enemy armor. I take one squad of eight men and highlight half of them, creating a second squad on the fly and sending them around to flank. Meanwhile, I send my heavy tank and armored car up a western road in a column, providing a massive base of fire while my infantry closes in.
An American Marine manages to lob an anti-tank grenade before I kill him, and the blast tears off one of my tank treads and cooks the engine. My crew bails out, one of them screaming and on fire. The other two are alive, but armed with only pistols. I send them over to two fallen Marines, take their weapons and ammo, and absorb the surviving tankers into my infantry squad as a pair of new SMG-toting assault soldiers.
My keystrokes are faster now, and I'm more confident. I never send troops forward without an established base of fire, and I've learned how to stop my entire army from belly-crawling slowly across open terrain. My arrogance grows as I easily capture the last American base on the map. A supply crate drops in and I send two squads at it, filling their arms with mines and ammo. I order two other squads to begin digging trenches and filling sandbags, while still another takes a repair kit and uses it to get the disabled tank moving again. Within minutes, we're a bristling hive of angry metal, ready to defend against the American counterattack. I smugly glow with pride at the efficient way I refitted my men to change from assault to defense.
Men Of War Assault Squad
The counterattack comes, and it comes hard. Even with time slowed down, I can't keep up with the pace as Americans rush in by the dozen. I've placed my mines in the wrong corridors, and without their explosive power, I don't have the bullets I need. One, then two, then nine of my men run low on ammo as the bodies pile up. After all of my begging, all of my work, Assault Squad 2 isn't ready to give in to me yet. As I fumble with keyboard shortcuts that I learned from forum posts, the game with hidden depths beats me over the head again with my ignorance.
Assault Squad 2 is like being handed a puzzle with no picture, then learning after several hours that it is actually a three-dimensional puzzle—and actually it's a model airplane. Learning and mastering its depths was rewarding to me, but I imagine it would be frustrating to players new to RTSes. Ac ryan playon hd mini 2 software update. For all its excellent graphics and features you can't find anywhere else in the RTS genre, there's no reason for the game to be so openly hostile to new players, and I fear that the multiplayer community will fail to flourish as a result.
Men Of War
I love Assault Squad 2, but it was not an easy romance. Its brutal difficulty spikes and hands-off approach to training should serve as a warning to all but the most grizzled of armchair generals: this game is war, and war is hell.