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More than a +1 in a crowded genre? Codemasters, alongside Best Way and 1C Company, have released Soldiers: Heroes of WWII (“Soldiers”) to a rather crowded sub-genre, the WWII-based strategy genre. Can it stand out?
Soldiers allows you to play as American, British, German, or Russian forces as part of four different campaigns. These campaigns (and some additional missions) allow you to play a total of thirty missions and each of them will prove to be quite a challenge. Perhaps this is a way to extend the game’s life, but expect to retry each mission at least twice (and that’s if you’re highly skilled like me, I kid, I kid). Soldiers brags about having various ways to accomplish missions, and that’s true for the most part. But for every positive route, there are several negative ones. Still, the difficulty isn’t something that will turn off most fans and it feels rewarding when you finally figure it out.
For the most part, the game resembles an RTS giving you an overall view of the action and indirect control of your troops. You can swing the camera around to get a better view, and make sure all your fronts are working efficiently). You can also take control of an individual unit and manually shoot (a lot more efficiently) or manually move a vehicle to a new area.
Soldiers features quite a few weapons from the four different nations, over a hundred, actually. You’ll find everything from simple handguns to rifles, grenades, submachine guns and machine guns. You can pick up the weapons of fallen enemies and even tear off the weapon of a vehicle. Likewise, there are several vehicles in the game. You can repair vehicles which allow you to take a destroyed enemy vehicle and use it yourself. Neither weapons or vehicles can be abused though, due to the rather limited amount of ammo and fuel (needed for the vehicles) you’ll find in the game. You can find ammo from fallen enemies, and you can find fuel from defeated vehicles but you’ll never have an overabundance of either.
If things ever get too difficult, you can hop online and play cooperatively with up to four other players. Theoretically, you can play online but you’ll need the person’s IP address, so good luck with that. LAN play eliminates this problem and worked well when I tested it (although only with one other person).
Where Soldiers best succeeds, though, is in the visuals. This is one immensely detailed game. The various environments you’ll find in the game feature incredibly detailed structures and high-resolution textures, which will surely push your videocard. They feature countless interactive areas, which can be used as cover and even destroyed. The attention to detail carries over to the units in the game, as well. The numerous vehicles can be destroyed and you’ll see parts of them (like the wheels) fall off. The troops move around in a very life-like fashion. You’ll see them accurately run about, take cover behind a building, or attempt to hide in the foliage.
The audio does a good job at aurally conveying the visuals, and features satisfactory music and sound effects but nothing out of the ordinary.
Soldiers: Heroes of World War II is a fun and interesting WWII-based strategy title. The attention to detail in both the visuals and gameplay distinguish it from other titles in the market, which is always a plus.
Minimum System Requirements:
1000Mhz Processor, 256MB RAM, Supported 32MB Videocard, DirectX 9.0b compatible sound card, 2GB free HDD space, 8x CD-ROM, Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP
Recommended System Requirements:
2.0Ghz Processor, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 8xxx+ or Nvidia GeforceFX 5xxx+, Windows 2000/XP
Supported Videocards:
ATI: Radeon 8xxx, 9000-9800 series| Nvidia: nForce 1,2; Geforce 2, 3, 4; GeforceFX series -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Jul 20, 2004
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