It's one thing to sit down with a heavily hyped, multi-zillion-dollar game from a major development studio and go through the headache-inducing process of measuring its actual merits versus the blaring klaxon of hype.
But when a title comes out of left field and knocks your socks off with its high production values, polished gameplay and sheer wealth of entertainment - well, it makes up for all those crappy movie tie-ins you have to play and review. And by you, I mean me. In case it wasn't obvious.
Developed by Ukraine-based studio Best Way, Soldiers: Heroes of World War II is a perfect example of the surprise sleeper hit. It's not quite a real-time strategy game and not quite a straight-ahead action experience, but rather a seldom-seen and careful combination of the two. Imagine the Total War series set during Dubya-Dubya-Two, with far fewer units but way more detail, interactivity and direct control, and you're on the right track.
Playing through any of four campaigns - Russian, German, British and American - you're tasked with a variety of military missions, carried out on breathtakingly detailed battlefields and generally against overwhelming odds.
Each individual soldier under your command has his own equipment inventory, and you can direct your troops (including vehicles like jeeps, trucks and tanks) via a point-and-click interface or by taking command of individual units and "steering" them with the cursor keys. The game is played from a 3-D, top-down perspective, with a fully controllable camera. It would be nice if the zoom controls let you to get a little closer to the action or pull out a little further for an overall battlefield view, but it's a minor quibble.
A context-sensitive cursor allows you to do some pretty surprising things, like set fires with diesel fuel, repair and resupply vehicles, lay mines and explosives or simply take cover behind objects, underneath foliage or inside houses. A handful of stealth missions affirms this game's similarity to the Commandos series, though I much prefer the more free-form mayhem and true 3-D environments of Soldiers.
The A.I. is at times questionable - for instance, enemy soldiers will often charge your tank or gun emplacement en masse in a bid to get close enough to whip off a grenade, even as you cut them down like a chainsaw in a bamboo forest. Um, guys? Time to try a new strategy, maybe?
But more often than not it's clever enough, and enemies (and your own CPU-controlled forces) will adapt to shifting battlefield conditions and even make use of new cover as it becomes available - like, say, the burned-out husk of the German halftrack that you just blew up with an armour-piercing tank round.
A fully implemented physics system is in place, meaning debris and bodies will spiral through the air following explosions, the impact of tank or artillery shells will cause vehicles to shudder and flip, quaint cottages will collapse under the treads of your Sherman tank ... Soldiers is easily the most cinematic tactical-strategy game I've ever seen. Even when your forces are getting obliterated in a hail of gunfire, grenades and shells, you almost can't help but smile.
And believe me, it'll happen often. The game's biggest hurdle to full enjoyment is its high degree of difficulty, requiring much thought, experimentation and saving and reloading in order to emerge victorious. Keeping an eye on all your various troops at once, especially when they're spread across the map, is also a little daunting.
But the sheer graphical splendour of the game (one that comes at the price of steep system requirements), the variety of the missions and the visceral thrill of the explosive battles more than makes up for the handful of shortcomings.
Last but not least, an online co-op mode also means you can recruit a friend to fight the good fight. Or, more likely, to die in the mud alongside you.
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BOTTOMLINE
Second World War games are a dime a dozen, as are war-based strategy titles. But Soldiers brings something new to both well-worn genres, and only its unforgiving difficulty keeps it from being a complete standout.
