Soldiers: Heroes of World War II

Sam feels thoroughly refreshed...

The physics extends to the bodies of all the wee men in the game. Toss a grenade into a machine gun pit and while the guy manning the gun will usually grit it out his mates will do their best to leg it. When the explosion rips through their fleeing backs it can send them into a pinwheel, throw them flat against the ground, or pick their limbs from their torso and spread the parts to the four corners of the map. Even a simple gunshot will cause bodies to Max Payne all over the place, with helmets shooting off and bodies coming to rest in the best ragdoll fashion. Roll a tank over a man and he's reduced to a red smear. All of which adds to the feeling that there's a little world behind your monitor and you get to kill and blow it all up. It's so much fun to just destroy everything in sight that it's a shame that there aren't any missions which give you free reign to go on the warpath without having to worry about the lives of your men.

There are some problems though. Your troops are not only willing to do the stupidest things under fire, they will do it again and again. Men will sometimes just cease to respond to events around them and although this can be a relief when it happens to the enemy it is bloody annoying when your own side decide to go on strike. The enemy AI is also a bit simplistic, and while it reacts reasonably well to sounds and the death of nearby comrades their attack training seems to have stopped after the first lesson: direct assault. Check out the screenshots, you can see how well this plan works in the 'hill o'death' picture. Enemies are able to flank you but this is only because they were positioned on your flank in the first place. Out side of control and camera issues, this is the most disappointing aspect of playing SHOWW2.

Missions are also often very finely balanced, so a tiny slip up will spark off a chain of events that will quickly see the objective failed and your men catching a ride to the pearly gates. While the control system is very good and gives the players a lot of options, the action on screen can soon overwhelm, sometimes so quickly that there isn't time to pause the game. The pause function is very useful and allows you to set orders for your men for them to carry out once the sands of time start to run again. You can also put the game into slow-motion. This is also rather handy, but inventory management becomes useless at this speed as all item and weapon swap outs have a set amount of time that it takes for them to be carried out. Still, it is good that there is a choice of ways to play the game yet a little more polish over the integration of the different speeds would have been appreciated.

The biggest difficulties with SHOWW2 come during your initial missions as you get to grips with the controls and the camera. The camera is too restricted for my liking, and although it is possible to zoom in really close to watch the little guys duke it out, there's not enough of a wide-angle view to let you really feel aware of what is going on around the battlefield. The little built in map is very handy, although it does spoil some of the surprise by indicating where all the enemies are. Saying this, when your mission forces you to wipe out every last foe this becomes a godsend. Frustration is the order of the day to start with, and there were a number of occasions when my poor cat had to abandon his usual throne - my lap - and head for a less turbulent sleeping surface. Obscenities flew out of my mouth at a rate to shame a sailor. I nearly came close to breaking real world objects as my little men so resolutely failed to break the virtual objects as I had told them to do.

I came close to giving up altogether on a few occasions. Many missions require a huge number of attempts, but when you finally nail that last objective the feeling of euphoria is worth the preceding distress. Even after the whole system becomes familiar and things really begin to gel the game can still throw a wobbly or do something stupid, but by that time you are having enough fun to forgive it its adolescent petulance. The game also has an inexcusable spawning system in place which means you can never sit peacefully and take stock of things without the worry of yet another squad of Germans marching in from off-screen to fall to the bullets of your entrenched machine gunner. There are mercifully few bugs, with only one show stopper making a repeated appearance, although a reload of a saved game fixes the problem.

One of the things that I was looking forward to the most was the co-operative multiplayer goodness that the game offered. Well, nuts, because I just could not get it to work. Even after following the solutions posted by similarly frustrated gamers on the forums I kept getting out of sync errors. This is a real shame, as I think that this game would be utterly fantastic with three friends and a common enemy to vanquish. Alas it was not to be, my only hope is that the next patch will sort out whatever it is that is denying me so cruelly. There is built in mod support which takes the pain out of testing and using a multitude of mods with some interesting little tweaks already available on the net. This engine really deserves to be used for a lot of other settings, and I firmly hope that the mod community will come out with some blinding creations in the future.

SHOWW2 has a real ace up its sleeve and that is the incredible amount of detail that has been crammed into the game. The animation of you men is very impressive and is another example of the devotion to detail that makes this game such a delight to behold. For example, swim your men through water and they will hold their gun out in front of them to keep it dry while they gamely crawl forward using one arm. Tanks belch smoke as they change direction and earth is gleefully tossed to the wind in each explosion. Blow an armoured car up and over the edge of a hill and it rolls down to the bottom. You can even kill all the wildlife, so if you have a particular thing for farm-yard chickens or had a horrible cow-tipping experience as a youngster, you can now get even on mother nature.

SHOWW2 can be an incredibly frustrating game, but after the learning process and the thinking behind the design of the game becomes more familiar this issue diminishes. Never completely, as this game does have the ability to foster an occasional love hate relationship with the player but it becomes the kind of frustration that you feel the need to conquer, as often it is not really the game's fault but rather an indication of the difficulties inherent in interfacing a ten fingered human being with a complex computer simulation. The detail of the environments, the splendour of the graphics, the wonder of the physics engine, all these things combine with the dangerously entertaining gameplay to make SHOWW2 the best game of its kind, and one of the most refreshingly enjoyable games I have had the pleasure to review.

91%

By Sam Gibson