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.
C.P.U= Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz
OR Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+
RAM= 2GB
Graphics= 256MB
