MEN of WAR

Anyone ever play Soldiers: Heroes of World War II? I must write a retrospective of it sometime. Though a very different breed of strategy game, it was out there doing some of the stuff Company of Heroes did, but two full years before Relic's tankiest opus - Dubya Dubya Too with hugely destructible environments, ultra-death and a smart emphasis on use of cover. While COH is by far the more polished option, this outdoes it for sheer ambition. It had stealable, pilotable vehicles. It had an RPG-lite inventory system. It had online co-op play. Perhaps most adorably, there was also a little of the Cannon Fodder to it -just a handful of all-too-easily killed squaddies against a whole bally army. It was also weird and rickety in the way so many Russian-made games seem to be. If you've never played it, try the demo - it's a fair fascinating wee thing.

I missed the sequel, the unfortunately-named Faeces of War, as is too often the case for games that don't drift onto my hard drive for work purposes. Hopefully I will get to play the freshly-revealed third game, Men of War. MEN of WAR. Men! War! That's definitely a name I can get behind.

Sounds as though it's largely the same shtick as the last two, in a sparkly new engine - which you can peek at below. The announcement worries me slightly, banging on as it does about:

"Dynamic in-game video enhances the single player missions, while the sounds of war have been given new range with over one hundred new sound effects of weapons and combat gear, recorded under real operating conditions. The single player campaign will also feature a fully customisable user interface, so players are able to have their command layout just as they please."

These do not seem like priorities to me. Tell me more about the explosions and setting Nazis on fire, please. Anyway, pictures. Click on each to see it full-size, and without my haphazard widescreen cropping:

'squite pretty, that. Mostly. I do declare myself interested.