Reader Reviews

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II (PC)

by Peej

You’d be forgiven for thinking that there wasn’t really anywhere else to go when it comes to producing a WWII-based game. In a bloated market filled with the likes of Commandos, Blitzkrieg, Silent Storm, Panzers, Desert Rats VS Afrika Korps and various FPS-based WWII titles, the subject of waging the second world war on your PC or console would be getting a bit tired. Well that was pretty much my impression of things until I managed to get hold of a copy of Codemasters’ “Soldiers: Heroes of World War II”.

Looking at the game, and the particularly “samey” looking graphics engine you’d probably think that this was just another “drag, click and tank-rush” strategy game. But at once you’d notice that rather than the usual fixed perspective gaming, “Soldiers” manages a brilliant trade off between fantastic miniature detail and a fully rotateable battle landscape. Amazingly it also manages to be one of the few titles to include a proper damage and scenery deformation model into the mix. See those guys hiding in a house? You want to get rid of them? Put a couple of high-explosive tank shells through the side and watch as the house collapses like a stack of cards. The damage model is also applied to all the vehicles and (rather unfortunate) soldiers in the game. So if one of your men is about to throw an anti-tank grenade and gets cut down by machine gun fire and drops the grenade at his own feet instead of throwing it, you can only guess what happens (and it happens in rather gory miniature detail too).

There are some performance issues because of the complexity of the engine, even on high-end machines there are times when the framerates do drop quite substantially if there is a lot of action on screen (or indeed if there are a lot of particle effects being generated by explosions or smoke). Fortunately things get so frenetic during play that you’re probably thankful that things slow down from time to time.

Oddly for a title such as this, the usual RTS-style controls aren’t the only option. What differentiates “Soldiers” from the horde of other titles available is the fact that you can optionally directly control each individual unit in the game rather than just pointing and clicking at where you want a unit to go, almost like you’d control units in a third/first person shooter. This is immensely satisfying as it does mean you have a fine granular control over where you place units, where you direct fire, and where you seek cover or shelter. Though in practice this control method is cludgy at first, you’ll soon get used to swapping between units swiftly.

Another nice feature is the almost RPG-esque way that you can scavenge the battlefield for weapons, ammo and equipment. You can even repair damaged enemy vehicles and use them to your advantage, in fact in some missions this is pretty much an essential strategy.

One thing that might annoy a lot of players is the sheer toughness of the game. Not only is the enemy AI absolutely unforgiving in single-player mode, some of the challenges spread across the four different campaign modes seem almost impossible but thankfully the game does give you plenty of options as to how you complete a mission, despite having quite rigid objectives. You may choose to utilise all your armoured units to win, or if you’re a bit of a masochist you may prefer the stealthy approach, using one or two foot soldiers sparingly, sneaking around the map quietly causing absolute havoc.

Adding to the whole package there are also bonus one-off missions to complete and naturally there is a multiplayer mode which is fully-featured and very satisfying if you can get enough players together (though network performance even on a local LAN was a bit haphazard at times).