Men of War

Possibly the best game about WWII, unless you want your games simplistic and easy, in which case you should settle for WII games. Like Soldiers, Men of War will be the best game no-one will buy. I hope I am wrong. [Apr 2009]

This might be the most gripping tactics title I've played in getting on for a decade.

It's a hard game, but that challenge and scope will be what keeps you coming back after your arse is handed to you. Again.

Detailed and destructible environments.

The successor to Faces of War (2006) has some useful innovations on offer, but is mainly about one thing: hard-core battles of WW2. It's exceptionally difficult, but not unfair. Veterans will enjoy using the innumerable amount of tactical options at hand. There's a multi-player mode for LAN and Internet for up to 16 players and a co-op mode for up to 3 players, too.

Because of the high difficulty and the dated graphics Men of War can only be recommended to hardcore strategy gamers. Those however will enjoy the game immensely.

Men of War is not going to appeal to the casual gamer. Only hardcores will be willing to attempt to crack this nut – it almost cracked this nut.

Men of War is a great game. The campaign is challenging and offers a wide array of units, strategies and tactics. MoW also features multiplayer and LAN so you can play in games with up to 16 people. The game also comes with a free mission editor so you can create your own maps and missions. Okay the AI is quite bad and the voice overs aren't perfect but over all this is a spectacular game with rich and diverse gameplay.

In games like Modern Warfare 2, the other players spoil the game for you while the CPU plays perfectly fairly. In this game, however, I found that it was the other way around. If anyone's played the campaign, even on easy mode, you'll know what I mean. It's not that the AI is unfairly skilled, just that they're unrealistically good at killing you. (When they're not confusedly taking cover behind your tank while at the same time trying to blow it up) In several missions the game hands you a well-equipped tank and crew, expecting you to go through the enemies like a hot knife through butter. I found myself hesitant, however, to do anything other than stay back and shoot, because the moment you try to charge through their defenses, they'll lob AT grenades at you like you've activated the "Catch" skull on Halo 3. Even if you're three feet away, and doing so will kill the thrower. Furthermore I found that the decision making skills are lacking, with my allies not returning fire with the enemy tank about to pound us into scrap metal, but instead continuing to shoot another German tank, one that was completely disabled and posed no threat to us whatsoever. Of course, with the "realism" factor, their shells just bounced off and made it that much more embarrassing. Which brings me to my next point. Realism is fine, but Best Way went overboard with it. It might be "realistic" that one in five of my anti tank emplacements' shells just bounce off of the advancing German armor, but it sure as hell isn't fair. Especially when that armor can cripple any of the emplacements with one hit. Well, I think that's enough negativity. Men of War does have some saving graces, and those would be the fully destructible environments, great cover system and the editor, which allows you to make your own mission and map. (I won't go into detail about a terribly pathetic campaign runthrough involving a nuke, editor explosions, hundreds of Spetsnaz troops and an infinite German spawner that was there by default for some reason.) So, there you go. In my opinion, Assault Squad is considerably better, but still needs improvement. If you're thinking of buying this game, don't expect anything great. In the words of Rob Talbert of ****, this game is a rent. PROS Editor mode Fully destructible environment Great cover system Historically accurate units Realistic CONS Terrible AI Bad mission design Realistic

Men of War had everything to be one of the best Real Time Tactics games, but failed at it because of many details, all summed up make the game annoying and frustrating. I love strategy games, the more detail the better, but when a game asks me to take care of a large battle and manage 100 soldiers with such detail that I have to search enemy bodies for ammo for every single one of my soldiers... sorry there's something wrong here. The AI is a mix of amazing and frustration, but I give a thumbs up here, the AI behaved fairly decently most of the time, but even then you better save often because while you micromanage some soldiers in the right, your only tank in the left might decide to move forward for whatever reason and die miserably. The Camera is very bad, you have to constantly micromanage the angle of vision because it doesn't allow the player to zoom out enough, not even near enough, creates a feeling that vehicle battles are just random stupidity. For Infantry the camera is good enough. Graphically the game looks very poorly optimized, I have a decent computer, in some battles I had to turn everything off or to low settings and even then it was bad, I've played far heavier games without half of the slow down. This creates a huge problem with unit selection and deselection, units lost constantly because the same button to deselect also allows to make a move order, come on... why in hell!? But not all is bad, small battles where there's not a ton of troops everywhere can be very fun, specially when there's a low amount of tanks involved, infantry vs infantry fighting is very good and dynamic. In the end I had some fun playing this game, but just as much frustration. For RTT aficionados I would recommend this game, other than that I don't recommend it, and make sure you have a pretty good computer to run this properly.

Somehow, 1C Company has managed to make a strategy wargame more painful than the act of war itself. Seriously, as interesting as this game looks with it's multitude of different units, vehicles and weapons, it is an exersize in frustration and mediocrity. Single player sways between pitched battles where you're expected to position an entire army in the 15 seconds it takes for the enemy forces to reach you, to laughable stealth missions in which stealth is literally not an option (don't forget insta-failing missions for conditions that you're never actually made aware of). I honestly don't know what the developers were thinking when they made this game, other than "let's try to take a tried and tested formula and make it as unfun as we can". Maybe it was a team building exersize or something. Worst part is that I'm being generous, there's like 20% of a reasonable game hidden in here. It's just a shame that you have to wade through the 80% of effluent that is the rest of this embarrassment to get to it.

I bought the game on sale from Steam and I've tried it out twice. My main experience is this: if you command infantry, you can never get all of the people in your squad to go where you want them to (at least 1 of my guys always stood in place unless I brought them into cover), tank tracks are destroyed like they're made of playdough (and it seems the computer always manages to disable my tank tracks from 1000 yards off with a tiny flak gun with one lucky shot while my tank crew shoots wildly and misses half the time), and you're fighting with a squad of 8 against dozens of enemies. This is the first mission of the game on Easy difficulty. I know I'm probably going to get a lot of people telling me I'm terrible at this game, but that's just my experience and because of that, I couldn't get into the game. I also had one of the "heroes" of the game get "killed" but instead of dying he was crouched down and used up all of the medpacks I had salvaged off of dead bodies without healing himself.