Pros: Awesome realism! Great scaling! Co-op with 4 players! Challenging & highly addictive! WWII!
Cons: Update your drivers & BIOS! Buy your friends this game for addictive, Co-op fun!
The Bottom Line: If you love World War II, then you must own this game. If you loved Microsoft's "Close Combat" PC game, then you must own this one. Online Co-op mode!!!
filivanili's Full Review: Soldiers: Heroes of World War II for Windows
I wholeheartedly disagree with the other reviewer (who seemed to have wrong expectations when purchasing this game). This game is not meant to be a 1st-person, shoot-em-up. It's a top-down perspective, tactical squad combat game set in World War II. If you liked Microsoft's "Close Combat" game, then you'll love this one.
If you're like me, when you played Close Combat or any military real-time strategy type game, didn't you wish you could personally take control of one of those guys, and toss that nade and blow up the enemy tank yourself? Now you can! Woot!
The most exciting element of the game is that you can either drag a box around guys or tanks and tell them to move somewhere, or, you can personally control a single unit, man, tank, jeep, halftrack, artillery gun...etc., and utterly control the performance of that unit; standing, kneeling, or prone, shooting, reloading, repairing, or looting corpses and taking their ammo, grenades, helmet...whatever! Also, whatever loot you find, you take with you into the next campaign mission! So you can trade up that Sherman tank for a Tiger, assuming you can knock it out and eliminate the crew (good luck), and then repair it with a repair kit! Speaking of vehicle crews, you can operate a vehicle with one guy or more. Typically tanks have room for four guys inside, and 4-6 guys can sit on the rear, outside of the tank (cool, huh?). Though one man can operate a tank, it's less efficient because he must switch between driving and gunning. A fuller crew means a more efficient, fast, and lethal tank experience. If an enemy infantryman manages to dislodge your track with a grenade, choose one of your crewmen to exit the tank (the others stay in side and continue to operate the turret)and open your tanks inventory, pull out a repair kit, and repair the damage. Keep in mind, enemy fire is riccocheting off the tank and your crewman may not complete the repair should he fall from enemy fire. Don't worry, though, you've still got 3 more crewmen to do the job.
The graphics are extremely detailed and everything is destructible. I repeat...everything is destructible. You can drive your tanks through the buildings and they crumble and fall with detailed realism into a heaping, dust-billowing, pile of rubble. Bushes and trees are swaying in the wind and they also move when enemies are sneaking through them, and, will fall over and burn when a grenade or artillery hits them. You can use a matchbook to set fire to fields and they burn quite realistically. Having trouble rooting out an enemy sniper in an upstairs window? Fire a bazooka and watch that fractional section of the building crumble to dust and your prey cease to exist... unless of course he saw it coming and ran out of the way (the AI is quite good at dodging fate).
More detail that I love includes the highly-detailed inventory system and sheer variety of weapon and ammunition types. Each soldier has a backpack to carry whatever assortment of weapons, ammunition, and other soldierly gear they start with or find along the way. Dead soldiers will drop their weapons on the ground and their backpacks can be looted by your victorious commandos. Need rifle ammo for your long-shooting sniper rifle? Find a fallen rifle on the ground, pick it up and manually unload the bullets from it. That's the kind of detailed realism this game is all about.
For those of you that need more than a 'G' or 'PG' rated blood-and-gore realism, this game delivers all the good gory carnage one could possibly imagine. It's the Saving Private Ryan of WWII games. Puffs of blood spurt when bullets hit. Men scream various epithets during moments of combat or stress. Limbs ragdoll across the screen when a tank shell nails someone leaving behind pools of blood.
The other extraordinary, and novel feature of this game, is that when you want to position a soldier behind a wall, say, an automatic cover/position indicator appears at the wall to indicate that the soldier, when moved there, will either stand, kneel, or lay prone behind it. This really, really helps the player understand the usefullness of the terrain and how to use it to their advantage during battle. When advancing silently on a pair of enemy troops, smoking and talking about the weather next to their halftrack (they are literally doing this in the game), you can stealthily crawl bush-to-bush, using the lay of the land (i.e. sloping hillside) to mask your approach, then whack the enemy with the butt of a rifle, a knife, or with your fists for maximum stealth. Keep in mind, you have many, many options for defeating the enemy. For instance, in the same scenario above, I could have also simply stormed their position with a submachinegun, or tossed a molitov cocktail and burned them to a crisp.
This is an extremely challenging game, which makes it extremely addictive. Don't worry, though, there are 3 levels of difficulty, "Easy" is a breeze, but we can't get past "Normal" right now so "Hard" is out of the question at the moment. It is non-linear in a tactical sense; you choose how to complete your objective. Storm up the middle with Thompson submachinegun blazing, sneak up the side without firing a shot, or steal a tank and bulldoze through all those pretty little country houses in town...it's your choice. The intelligence of the AI is incredible...they constantly rush my sniper or sneak around the houses through the bushes to flank my men. When shot at, they duck for cover inside buildings, walls, and vehicles.
My favorite way to play is actually Multiplayer Coop...yes, it actually has that all-too-hard-to-find-in-other-games Co-operative mode where you can join a maximum of 3 other friends online and duke it out with the enemy together. Typically each of you controls one or two soldiers and possibly a tank, and you must learn how to cooperate and maneuver your units to operate effectively together. I do recommend downloading and installing a free chat application for live voice-chatting with your buddies. There is an in-game chat function, but typing a warning to your buddy that there's an incoming grenade headed his way won't save him in time. The best, free, downloadable voice chat program, in my experience, is Ventrilo, available at www.ventrilo.com.
Tech considerations: I do advise updating your Bios and all hardware drivers to the most current version before playing, as the graphics and sounds are very nice and your system needs to be fully updated or it'll run very slowly. My system is: AMD Athlon 1.7Ghz processor, 512mb memory, nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 128mb video card, and Creative SB Audigy Gamer 5.1 soundcard. For multi-play, I have a cable connection with a 3mb download 500k upload and I'm on a shared connection with my wife via a Linksys router.
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