Impressions: Men of War
By gpbmike 3 Comments
Somehow Men of War slipped under my radar this year. Yesterday I noticed it was on sale for $12 on Steam. I'm a sucker for WWII strategy games so I thought I'd give it a shot. When I bought it I didn't even realize it was in the same series as Soldiers: Heroes of World War II, which I liked, and Faces of War, which I didn't. I installed it pretty late last night so I only played through the first level but here's my thoughts so far.
The voice acting is abysmal. Maybe I've been spoiled recently with Uncharted 2, but I actually laughed at the voice actors a couple of times. Here's a sample I found:
"Hope we're not too late for war. Let's give those germans what for!" ...... what? Surprisingly, the narrator does an alright job with his part, but anything said during gameplay is pretty bad.
Like Faces of War, the tutorials aren't very helpful. If I hadn't already played the previous games in the series I might have been turned away pretty quickly. Men of War follows in the tradition of giving you a lot of control over your units. Each unit has its own inventory including weapons, ammunition, and gear like helmets and bandages. You have to add a crew to vehicles and make sure they have fuel and ammo. You also have the ability to take "direct control" of a unit which allows you to move it with the arrow keys and aim/fire with the mouse. I haven't used this ability yet in Men of War but in previous games I used it to snipe or precisely target tank shots.
I found the line of sight implementation a little frustrating. There is no indication (that I could find) of when your units are able to see the enemy. You can click on enemy units to see their line of sight, but I'm not sure how to do that with your own units.
Men of War is unforgiving. If you don't suppress or flank the enemy your troops will be gunned down pretty quickly. While your units have a health bar that they can recover with bandages, it only takes a few hits to take them out. Armored vehicles on the other hand cannot be whittled down with light arms fire. In fact, if you hit a sloped piece of armor on a tank with a shell, there's a good chance it will just glance off and unintentionally hit something else.
After the first level, I'm happy that it's playing better than Faces of War.