Brutally tough and unforgiving, Men of War: Vietnam is a serious test of your patience and your real-time strategy skills.
How
much you enjoy Men of War: Vietnam depends on your patience for
constant saving and reloading. Just like in the earlier releases in this
1C Company series of real-time squad combat games, the difficulty has
been cranked through the roof. Your small squads have to battle their
way through dozens if not hundreds of enemies in each and every mission,
with even a single misstep often resulting in instant failure. That
doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, and it isn't. The mission design
is so grueling that you feel wrung out by the time you cross the finish
line. Still, there are some positives. Maps are intricately designed,
and a cooperative option for the campaign lets you team up with as many
as three other players, which both makes things easier and adds some
replay value
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.
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.
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.
System Requirment
C.P.U=COR 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz
Ram=2Gb
Graphics=256MB
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