Hour of Victory

With a particular name that sounds like it's artfully created to invoke a sense of ingenuity, it's difficult to feel like Midway's Hour of Victory is nothing more than a worthy attempt to entice people who've already purchased Call of Duty or Medal of Honor games. But Hour of Victory entirely succeeds at this attempt. On the disc lies a world where tanks are brilliant tools of destruction, where the game consistently functions despite the ridiculous amount of action on-screen, and the various means of combat are all excellently balanced in terms of effectiveness. Hour of Victory is complete in several spectacular ways; and everyone, under any circumstances, should play this game.

A discriminate story ties the action together, and you embark on multiple campaigns that smoothly jump from one part of the war to another, so it's easy to tell exactly when the game is supposed to take place. The advertising for this game invites you to "fight the famous battles of WWII," in which it's easy to find many distinct and memorable battles. At one moment, you're helping a scientist escape from a castle, but in another, you're attempting to prevent German soldiers from overloading a nuclear reactor and turning Berlin into some kind of radioactive disaster zone. The game's easy to understand, yet refreshingly unpredictable.

You'll take on the roles of three different troops, each with their own unique specialties. Before most levels, you can choose to play as a sniper, a stealth guy, or an upfront fighter, and each has his own unique abilities. The sniper can deploy a grappling hook in a few spots, while the stealth guy can hide in shadows to become mostly invisible and pick locks. The commando can take more hits before he dies, and he can also push a few heavy objects around. Because of the game's many strengths, the commando, being the most straightforward character of the bunch, is almost always the best choice because the ability to take on more damage before going down is more useful than the frequent shortcut or high sniper spot you'll get with the other characters.  

Why else is the commando the best choice? Well, all of the characters have melee attacks that eliminate enemies with one hit, which makes getting up close and personal with the game's dynamic enemies the funnest approach. The artificial intelligence is some of the best in the industry and seems to have been polished to a shine. Enemies will constantly be aware of your presence, and will react dynamically to your actions and to the environment, always trying the best ways to keep themselves alive and to kill you. Sometimes they'll wait for you to reach them and then spring up on you when you least expect them, or they'll attack you more fiercely when they see you're about to die. There's a lot of unpredictability to the enemy's behavior, which in turn increases amount of value of the game . The game's levels are fairly long, and even though there are a fair amount of checkpoints, it's difficult to complete the game in even sixteen hours.


How does a game so refined end up receiving such low review scores? We may never know.

Along with the outstanding single-player mode, there's also an incredible multiplayer mode that allows up to 12 players to play three team-based modes. The plentiful online population means we have had a very diverse assortment of matches with none ever being less than six players. Team deathmatch, capture the flag, and devastation are the three modes. Devastation is a bomb mode, where players fight to control a bomb and use it to blow up five enemy targets. The player movement in multiplayer feels just right, and levels with drivable tanks are exceptionally balanced because the tank control is completely intuitive making controlling them incredibly easy.

With the combination with an extremely oriented soundtrack and absolutely stunning graphics, you've got an brilliantly fantastic game on your hands. It's sort of disgusting that Hour of Victory managed to get such poor reviews and sales because everyone needs to play this game.