Soldiers: Heroes of World War II

PC review by Matt Wadleigh, published on Sunday 19th September 2004

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II was plopped down on my desk the other day, and after reading through some of the attached press releases, I was a bit anxious to give it a shot. The game promised “RTS-style gameplay” mixed with the best parts of shooters with an all-new “Direct Control” mode that allows you to control each individual unit’s actions like you would in a third-person shooter. This sounded way, way too good to be true. The only other game I’ve ever seen pull of the feat of combining RTS with anything was Savage, and that was highly praised but it never really flew off the shelves. While very different than Savage in many regards, will Soldiers: Heroes of World War II fly of the shelves?

As I began Soldiers, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t know exactly what to do, as I’d never played a game like this before. Fortunately, there were several included tutorials that acted as a sort of “boot camp” for players that are still a little green. In these, you learn the basics of movement, combat, swimming (yes, units in an RTS game finally swim!), and the other various skills you’ll need. You’ll also learn a number of new things, like how to climb over walls and duck under barbed wire. The tutorial however, proved surprisingly challenging. The first difficulty I had was reading the actual objectives. The white text on the surprisingly bright dirt ground was a bit hard to read, and I strained to read the instructions on what I was to actually do. I tried to continue on without them and figure it out, but I couldn’t trigger some of the events if I did that, so I just had to squint and try to make out the entire message.

Even worse, when I couldn’t figure it out and the triggers didn’t activate, I had to go all the way out of the level and restart through the main menu. Why a “restart” button on the in-game menu wasn’t included is beyond me, though you can quick save and reload your game at will. I also died several times in the tutorial. Once, I blew the shit out of a motorbike, and as cool as the resulting explosion was, apparently I wasn’t far enough away from it and it owned me. Another time, I ran into some barbed wire, thinking that my soldier would be a little brighter and automatically duck under it, but he wasn’t. I had to do that myself.

Once I finally got through the first tutorial (only took me about an hour), I decided to try a real mission. I figured that since I’d survived the first tutorial, I was probably pretty capable of surviving the first mission. I was wrong. In fact, I’d say that I made a very serious miscalculation. The first mission saw me battling the Germans as the Russians. While the Russians were always short on equipment, they were never short on men. Yet for some reason in this mission I only had two men, a tank, and an armored car. That doesn’t even seem like a reasonable or rational strategy at all, for any military engagement, especially one in this game: with this small ensemble, you have to take over an entire town occupied by German troops.

I went back to the tutorials. I learned how to plant mines. I learned how to set dynamite. I paid close attention to everything. I found out how to rotate the camera, zoom in, and dozens of keyboard commands. I went so far as to go online and register with Codemasters to get tips and hints emailed to me directly. I was once again excited. Now that I knew everything that there was to know, I was bound to be a success. Just like math tests though, even when I’d studied up, I was still destined to fail.

To say that I didn’t excel in Soldiers is an understatement. To say that every time I thought up a good strategy that I thought would work well and the game totally raped me behind a gas station is more like it. Every single mission I tried, each technique I used, every hotkey I pressed, somehow in the end it inevitably lead to me getting killed by the enemy. Quick saving and trudging through still caused more mission failed screens than I can remember. The brother of Anthony Karge, one of Thunderbolt’s finest, told me that “it took me one day just to beat the first mission.” If he’d told me that before I’d played the game, I just would have assumed he sucked. Now that I have, I know that Mark doesn’t suck, the game does.

Yes, you’ve read right: this game is too hard for me, so it sucks. Every single review I’ve read of this game says it’s too damned hard, yet all of them give it a good score because it does other things well. How about this instead: if the average player isn’t going to have the patience to sit through the game, then it’s not a good game, period. If I can’t get through a single level, what’s it matter if the game has more than thirty of them? What’s it matter if the games features a “huge array of accurately modeled vehicles” if I’m not going to see any of them?

Soldiers however does have a lot of interesting concepts, but they’re all for naught because of the intense difficulty level. The direct control options offer a lot of involvement in your unit’s actions, from choosing whether you want them to go prone, crouch behind objects, or hide behind trees. The levels are also pretty freaking huge, and even more impressive than that is the ability to blow the crap out of anything. Your mighty tank can run through houses and over trees, and its fun to witness the destruction in action. Even the mission ideas are interesting in their own right; just a few elite troops fighting off swarms of troops in enemy territory…just for some reason it couldn’t be like every other game and be an achievable objective. Each soldier also has their own inventory, which tracks the ammo they have to shoot with, which makes strategizing all that more important. There’s also an included co-op multiplayer mode, which is a good addition, but the game is still too hard.

It’s such a shame that an excellent graphics engine like this is used in a game like this. Look at the screenshots, and you’ll see that this is one incredible looking strategy game. The levels are expansive, and everything from the water to the trees to the explosions looks impressive. Even the little units that you control are all well animated. Of course, to see this, your frame rates going to stutter and your resolutions going to have to be low, because this game made my P4 2.8 GHZ, ATI Radeon 9700 system struggle. Put it this way: it ran Doom 3 at 800X600 at Medium resolution, and that’s a much more demanding game.

The sound is hit or miss, with lots of repetitive voice-overs but a few orchestrated scores that really stand out and could be found in many WWII films. One thing that I found interesting: when you finish up a mission (either failing or passing…well, I assume when you pass a mission) you’re given a little narrative about what happened after you passed/failed. I thought this really worked well with this game.

Having played countless RTS games (Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, and Age of Empires) and countless shooters set in the WWII era (Battlefield 1942, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor), Soldiers: Heroes of WWII seems like a great idea. In the end though, the maddening difficulty level of this game destroys it. If you’re truly patient, then maybe, just maybe you might be able to get something out of it (Anthony’s brother pledges that it’s a good game once you get past the second mission), but if you’re like me who plays games to be entertained, I think you’re going to find yourself wanting to return this one.