Comments on: MEN of WAR

By: ed

ed — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:18:39 +0000

GoG has a DRM/Starforce free fully patched version of Soldiers:HOWWII (including Vista compat. patch) for $9.99. Steam also released it recently for $9.99 but apparently the Steam version does not include the Vista compatibility patch yet.

By: Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Laggy, but never saggy » Blog Archive » Interview: Men of War

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:32:41 +0000

[...] couple of weeks ago, we posted about the announcement of Men of War, the second sequel to the lovely but little-known Soldiers: [...]

By: Popalu

Popalu — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:07:47 +0000

Soldiers was a class game in all respects and deserved to be wider known (Apart from SF protection). Fow expanded it with improved graphics and gameplay and yet never captured the true SHOWW2 audience

Some of the comments on here are wrong about FOW

The soldiers in FOW are not invincible, play it on Realistic and they die just like they do in SHOWW2, with tanks, etc running over them. Shame there is no middle option between easy(Arcade) and hard(Realistic)

One shot sniper head shots are still possible in FOW

The individual inventories are still there for each soldier, they are not missing, allowing you to collect anything from the battle field.

You can pick up any weapon, ammo, piece of equipment from dead bodies or lying on the ground. Bazookas, rifles, pistols, grenades, flame throwers, etc

You can drive any vehicle in the game, and in most cases, repair it if it is damaged, as long as you have a repair kit and the damage is not too great

All buildings can be destroyed, you can drive through them or just grenade/bazooka them until they topple realistically, then use the ruins as cover.

You can enter the buildings and use them as sniper lookouts, Direct controlling the sniper to pick off enemy soldiers

The squad system they introduced in FOW was fiddly and spoiled the demo, so put a lot of people off, as it was hard to control all your men and achieve the objectives easily, but in the final game, you can turn it off and go back to the old SHOWW2 way of controlling groups of men, ala RTS drag and drop format, but still retain the DC over individual soldiers

You can still take direct control over your men or tank/truck/jeep/howitzer/boat etc and do what you want, hwo you want.

A great game, batter than COH in my opinion and hopefully MoW will improve on the advances made in FoW, but still keep the original flavour of SHOWW2

By: M_Wittmann

M_Wittmann — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:16:55 +0000

Much more better than CoH, no doubt. Who had the brilliant idea to give tanks a healthbar? :/

By: Reiver

Reiver — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:35:24 +0000

re how easy FoW was: The game had two settings; Arcade and realistic. Arcade meant your guys could go toe to toe with a panzer and punch it to death. Realistic meant a malevolent look was enough to decimate your entire squad. The AI of your troops, that gave them a large amount of autonomy, meant playing on the realistic setting was pure masochism. The idea was to have troops that reacted believably. Running from nades, firing at enemies, retreating when overwhelmed etc. The reality was playing nursemaid to a bunch of obstinately suicidal morons that ignored your command to lie down and hold fire in favour of jumping onto the lip of the trench and facing down a machine gun.
The AI improved after a series of patches and the game is now quite enjoyable but the lack of a middleground between arcade and realistic is still a big omission. Still it’s cheap and looks great. The satisfaction of finishing a mission and tracing your path across the battlefield by the scarred earth, corpses and crumbled buildings is worth experiencing.

By: Fat Zombie

Fat Zombie — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:07:08 +0000

I remember why I like this game more than Company of Heroes! You can buy fuel tankers, and then drive them into the back of enemy tanks!

It’s like an RTS version of Battlefield 1942. But with more physics.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 02:20:11 +0000

Next Codename Panzers game? What what?!

By: kuddles

kuddles — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:05:57 +0000

Awesome! I didn’t even know this game is on the horizon. Between this, World in Conflict, Company of Heroes and the next Codename Panzer game, times have been good for fans of real time tactical games that don’t have dirt farming.

By: OrionSmith

OrionSmith — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:46:43 +0000

Wow, I actually thought I was the only one who knew about SHOWWII. When it first came out I spent the whole summer working through the campaigns. It was a game ahead of its time.
Everytime I have a few friends over for a lan I drag it out and force them to play some co-op.

I think the vista fix gets rid of starforce, and it works on xp too.

By: drunkymonkey

drunkymonkey — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:52:48 +0000

Along with the original Ratchet and Clank, Soldiers takes its place as one of the two best demos that I never bought the game for.

I have it installed on my PC. And yeah, it was more ambitious than CoH by a long shot. The physics were excellent, and it was wonderfully kinetic and explosive.

By: Cigol

Cigol — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:14:53 +0000

Soldiers was class, particularly playing it online in co-op mode. It was just sublime, really. It was Commando’s mixed with Cannon Fodder mixed with generic WW2 RTS (Sudden Strike?)

I bought it despite the presence of starforce and loved it – definitely check it out if you haven’t already, the missions in singleplayer are extremely satisfying and can be played various ways.

By: Optimaximal

Optimaximal — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:15:18 +0000

For the record, the Sold-Out/Codemasters Budget range versions come on a DVD rather than CD and I think they snipped out the copy protection for the Sold-Out version too…

Should check really :)