Men of War: Vietnam

At least Men of War: Vietnam is honest up front. The very first mission tosses you into the deep end without any life preservers. Denied even the benefit of a brief tutorial or some tips on how to handle the first few enemy encounters, you're thrown into the midst of a battle between the US and a small group of Russian advisors and Vietcong soldiers. A Huey incinerates your convoy in the scripted opening seconds and then returns to obliterate the paltry four survivors in your squad within moments. Either you get your guys off the road and under cover in less time than it took you to read the start of this paragraph, or everybody dies. It's an abysmal introduction. It's hard to imagine anyone new to the Men of War series sticking around for very long after this greeting. Even series veterans can't help but be taken aback by how brutally the game begins. Playing on easy helps a bit by reducing enemy numbers, but the game remains incredibly punishing.

The two-part campaign that sees the first five missions focusing on Russian and Vietcong troops and the second five missions swinging over to the US is unforgiving all the way through. You go into missions with tiny squads ranging from just four guys to around a dozen or so, and you have to fight and/or sneak your way through huge maps crawling with countless enemy patrols and dotted with umpteen goals. The playing field is so tilted against you that you're at risk of it falling on your head at any moment. Enemies can spot you from long distances, hear you even when you're firing silenced rounds, and shoot you with unerring accuracy even when you're hunkered down behind brush. The entire squad can be wiped out in mere moments, at almost any time. You need to creep forward very cautiously, experiment with a lot of trial and error, and save every time you do anything even remotely good. Kill a bad guy? Save. Find a great cover spot? Save. And so on. At least the game helps out by autosaving at smart, frequent intervals.

There are a couple of saving graces. Mission maps are extremely detailed and come with multiple options to get past every enemy troop position. Granted, sometimes none of them are pleasant, but at least you have many choices, ranging from open assaults to flanking maneuvers to firing locations and weapon selection. Enemy artificial intelligence is lacking, too, though at least the stupidity of your foes makes it easier to complete scenarios against the incredible odds. Foes typically respond to attacks by going back to standard patrol routes, oblivious to the corpses of their comrades and the burning wreckage around them, or by walking mindlessly into the jungle until your lads shoot them to bits. When you're beaten, you're beaten through sheer force of numbers or by superior enemy positions like bunkers, but never from being outsmarted.


Zoom in close for all the glorious battle detail, like your men being overrun enemies.
Unfortunately, your own troops aren't very smart, either. They often switch weapons for no apparent reason in mid-battle and ignore enemies gleefully murdering the whole squad from a few feet away. Maybe it's the cover itself, or maybe it's dumb soldiers not standing in the right spots, but your boys often seem to think they're hidden when they're exposed enough to take a bullet to the head. Targeting isn't very accurate, unless you micromanage troops with direct control, which is hard to do in the middle of a big scrap. You can order your squad to assault a lone VC hiding behind a truck, for example, and watch in horror as your lads line up behind the bumper and fill it full of holes…while your enemy pops out of cover and slaughters everyone.

Special abilities and weapons offer some chance at survival. There is something of a role-playing flavor here with named squadmates who come equipped with gear and combat skills. At times, the game resembles the Commandos series. Troops with silenced SMGs, sniper rifles, and big M60s provide you with a shot at whittling down enemy numbers. That said, the small size of your squads makes it devastating when just one man is killed. Lose your sniper, and it's pretty much game over unless you're in the home stretch.

Jungle terrain is both an ally and an enemy. The engine does a great job rendering the foliage of Southeast Asia, and it isn't just for show. It's so thick that you can ably stage hit-and-run raids where you blitz enemy positions and then fade back into the green. Bad guys take advantage of the green stuff as well, though, and it's so voluminous that you often can't see anything. Events develop so fast that your men might be slaughtered before you can get the camera properly into position. You expect a lot of jungle in a Vietnam game, of course, but it seems like you wind up with a big frond in your face every time you adjust the camera the slightest bit to better view a firefight.


The plan: Kill, or be killed.
All of the campaign missions can also be run through cooperatively with up to four other players. This is the best way to play the game, as it mitigates the extreme difficulty of going solo. It also lets you tackle objectives more efficiently via coordinated attacks. Some missions seem to have been designed with co-op in mind. The first mission, in fact, features a section where you must detonate three US Hueys before they take off. This is hard to achieve playing solo without sacrificing at least one man during the assault, because the choppers head to the skies almost as soon as you open fire. But when you're playing with a buddy, you can divvy up the targets to blow them all up before the pilots can get the rotors spinning. Unfortunately, there are some technical problems with online play. Connection errors frequently pop up on the server screen, making it impossible to join many matches. This may be because of conflicts between various versions of the game sold by different retailers or conflicts between those who purchased the DLC pack released alongside the main game and those who did not. Either way, a patch is desperately needed. Even when you can get into games, the play is a bit laggy, and synchronization issues frequently arise.

As frustrating as Men of War: Vietnam is, it still provides some satisfying moments. Emerging hale and hearty at the end of a mission is always cause for celebration, seeing how the odds are so slanted against you, and the opposing forces are made up of what seems to be the entire US Army or Vietcong. Still, the extreme challenge is a tough sell, and it makes it so difficult to get past the first mission that you might never get to the point where you can get hooked.

Men of War: Assault Squad Review

The authentic Men of War: Assault Squad packs plenty of challenge for real-time strategy enthusiasts.

The Good

• Tough battle scenarios that force you to use all of your units in combat   
• Brilliant, aggressive enemy AI   
• Mission maps so intricately designed that they play like devious puzzles   
• Co-op multiplayer mode of play.

The Bad

• Too challenging in spots   
• Some missions drag on for too long.

Serious challenge is what Men of War: Assault Squad is all about. This tactical real-time game from Digitalmindsoft is something of a crueler version of similar games such as Company of Heroes and Codename: Panzers. Like the original Men of War that became a cult hit in 2009, this take-no-prisoners sequel boasts a rigorous attention to realism geared toward confounding tank rushers with no understanding of combined-arms tactics. In other words, you really have to know what you're doing to avoid the fate of having your name carved on a cenotaph back home in 1945. If you're up for a grueling yet satisfying slog through Tom Brokaw's war, this is a great way to kill some more Nazis on your nights off.

Even though battles play out a little like battlefield games of chess, you still get to blow things up on a regular basis.

The basics of Assault Squad fit in with the likes of its WWII real-time strategy predecessors. The structure of the game is simple, and the interface is so intuitive that you don't need to refer to the manual or go through a tutorial (which you don't get anyway). Scenarios are tackled by starting at the south end of the map and blitzkrieging your way to the north, blowing apart progressively tougher enemy troop emplacements and fortifications as you go. If you capture flag-bedecked strategic points on the battlefields, you're rewarded with unit points that you can use to order up new troops, tanks, mortars, and naval bombardments.

And that's pretty much it. There are no bases to build or resources to manage other than the points needed for reinforcements. Battles are available in two flavors. Skirmish features 15 huge one-off scenarios where you lead the troops of the USA, Commonwealth, Soviet Union, Germany, or Japan against their respective enemies. Settings range from wartorn France in the wake of the Normandy invasion, to the bleached-out deserts of North Africa, to the jungles of Southeast Asia. You can also take the fight online. There are three versus battle modes pitting as many as 16 players against one another on massive maps, along with a new cooperative mode where you work together with up to three friends on missions against the AI. The latter is Men of War at its best, since you wage joint warfare that emphasizes the combined-arms teamwork design of the entire game.

And the game doesn't pull any punches with its combined-arms focus. You cannot win battles in Assault Squad by simply band-selecting a bunch of tanks or troops and hurling them at the enemy lines while the generic RTS martial music stomps away in the background and your soldiers holler battle cries like "That one's for Uncle Sam!" While you might roll Stuarts over the odd little guy, opposing infantry comes with antitank grenades and rocket launchers that can shred your supposedly mighty armor columns in mere moments. So you have to use all of your resources, switching from basic infantry to antitank specialists to tanks to mortars to snipers to elite nation-specific units like the Rangers and the Red Guards as the occasion fits. Strategic planning is also vital. Using every scrap of scrub, broken wall, and flaming half-track for cover is crucial to keep your lads alive and fighting for God and country. It's easy to duck and cover, too, because the interface automatically shows you ghost positions of troops behind the selected terrain before you issue any orders. Do this smartly and keep one move ahead of the bad guys with flanking maneuvers, and you just might live long enough to get a Dear John letter from back home.

Battles play out a bit like addictive rock-paper-scissors puzzles where you're always searching for the right tactics to use in the right situations. You aren't locked into solitary solutions, however. The sheer variety of units that you can deploy, along with the amazingly detailed layout of the destructible maps, means that every enemy position can be taken out in almost limitless ways. Vehicles can be repaired, enemies can be looted for hardware, buildings can be occupied for firing positions or destroyed to clear a shooting angle, and so on. Enemy AI is fantastic as well. While you have to take a few moments to think about your next steps, you can't spend too much time sitting around because aggressive enemy forces quickly zero in on your location and obliterate it. Some of the moves that the enemy can pull off are nothing short of astounding. Enemy forces are ruthless and not above resorting to desperate measures in desperate situations. For instance, Nazis might send armored cars on suicide missions that roll over mortars to destroy them before being blown apart by the SAS. So when you do win a scenario, you get a great flush of accomplishment found more often in cerebral wargames than in blow-'em-up RTS affairs.

Smart use of all of your units--like this very handy mortar--is crucial if you are to emerge victorious from any of Assault Squad's battle scenarios.

At times, however, battles have to be fought a little too meticulously, and micromanagement is often necessary. You need to place single troops on captured guns, split squads up to repair vehicles, and even call out the odd unfortunate grunt to make a suicide run toward enemy pillboxes or armor that you can't take out in any other fashion. This results in some fantastic moments, but it also drags missions out. Enemy aggressiveness can be over the top. Tanks and troops flow into the fray from offscreen so often in some missions that you find yourself refighting battles for strategic points over and over again. It's a somewhat realistic setup that forces you to station troops at vital locations or lose them to the enemy, but it also means some tedium because you have to take a cautious approach to every move you make. Instant enemy reinforcements also seem like a cheat. You finally get a sector of the map pacified and turn your attentions elsewhere, and whammo! Here come a couple of panzers and some pals in army boots from beyond the fog of war at the edge of the screen. This can be an annoyance in the single-player skirmishes because the maps are huge and the action typically takes place on at least two or three fronts simultaneously. In some ways, the missions here are geared more for the co-op mode than for going it solo because at times you really need a buddy to watch your back.

When you get right down to it, Men of War: Assault Squad is a tactical WWII RTS game for those who have mastered the somewhat easier-to-handle Company of Heroes. This is a challenging battlefield experience somewhat closer to a wargame than to a traditional RTS game and as such is geared to more of a hardcore crowd. It isn't such a great option for tank rushers who don't have a lot of time to spare to learn combined-arms intricacies. Be aware of these demands going in, and you will have a great time refighting this war.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot