Faces of War Hands-On - Say Hello to a New Kind of World War II Game

There have been so many World War II-based real-time-strategy games released over the past few years that you almost have no idea what to make of it when a game like Faces of War arrives. This innovative real-time strategy isn't like any real-time strategy that you've played before. There isn't any of the traditional base-building or resource-gathering, and you don't even control an army. On the contrary, Faces of War gives you command of a single squad caught in the middle of huge and intense battles, and it's up to you to get them through it alive. And yet, the game executes this concept in such a unique way that even after just playing around with a very early version of the game, it's not too far-fetched to believe that this may very well be one of the sleeper hit PC games of the year. So what is Faces of War? Read on.

Developed by Ukraine's Best Way, Faces of War is a squad-based game that just looks like it's a large-scale real-time strategy game. Traditional real-time strategy games let you command dozens of units on the battlefield and then micromanage their every little detail. In contrast, Faces of War only lets you control a small squad of infantry, but you're still caught in the midst of a much bigger battle with other units around you. The result is that while you're busy guiding and controlling your squad to complete its objectives, chaos is erupting all around your troops. For example, in one of the battles, you'll land your squad on the beach during D-Day and have to battle up through a French village. To your left and right are other computer-controlled squads trying to do the same thing. In front of you is a whole mess of German troops, machine-gun nests, and tanks. If that sounds pretty formidable, that's because it is.

The first objective is to get your guys off the beach, so you click on your troops and tell them to seek cover behind some of the steel-tank obstacles that the Germans put on the beach. Once the order is given, the artificial intelligence kicks in, and the guys find the best cover available to begin returning fire on the enemy. Once they're in place, you can move them farther up the beach behind some cover, where they'll encounter a barricaded beach house with a machine-gun nest that's firing out onto the beach. We solved this problem by ordering the squad to use its bazookas to blast the machine gunner, and then ordering them into the house. By the way, this solution created a huge problem later on when we encountered German panzers and had no more bazooka rounds left. Needless to say, we had to start the battle over again.

Meanwhile, as we were trying to enter the beach house, the rest of the battle was going down all around the squad. To the left, AI-controlled squads ran into heavy German resistance, and we were required to help by flanking the German defenders with our squad. Once the beach was cleared, friendly tanks rolled up and began pushing into town, only to encounter German panzers. As if the battle wasn't already chaotic enough, it escalates even further once tanks get involved. This is because Faces of War has a fairly advanced graphics and physics engine, so you can destroy pretty much everything onscreen. For instance, during the initial infantry assault, we managed to level the beach house that the machine-gun nest was holed up in by blasting it with the bazookas. In other moments, we saw the cover that our troops were huddling behind get shredded by the sheer volume of fire, forcing them to retreat to more durable cover. It goes without saying that part of the fun in the game is going to be destroying everything you see. We saw a bit of this in the second mission, which involved kicking the Germans out of another French village. Before long, the place was gutted.

It's not just infantry combat in Faces of War, either--you can take command of various vehicles. Simply tell the squad to commandeer an abandoned vehicle, and they'll do so. For instance, an empty German tank can be put to good use. Just tell your men to jump in, and they'll assume the various crew positions. You can then give orders to the tank, and they'll be carried out.

You can give commands to the squad as a whole, or you can give orders to individual soldiers. Like the cast of characters in any good World War II movie, your squad consists of specialists who may be called upon to display their skills at certain times. That means you can select the squad sniper and give him a specific command, while you give a different command to the squad's bazooka carrier. You can even go one step further and take direct control of each soldier as if this were a true action game. The arrow keys let you move the soldier on the battlefield, and the mouse lets you aim and fire the soldier's weapons.

The inventory system lets you tinker with each soldier's loadout, as there are dozens of different weapons and pieces of equipment that you can carry into battle. Soldiers carry limited amounts of ammunition, but they can also pick up weapons and ammo from the fallen. And, you can tinker with their inventories to determine which weapons they'll use. Your soldiers also carry health packs, which is important. Thankfully, Faces of War isn't a realistic game in the sense that your guys fall over after a single hit. Instead, they have health bars, and they can absorb a lot of damage before they die. Whenever the soldiers' bars run low, simply tell them to bandage themselves with a health kit and their health bars will slowly fill up. The sheer amount of hit points that each soldier has leaves little doubt that this is very much an action-style RTS, and not a realistic simulation.

We've already mentioned the destructible environments, but we should note that there's quite a bit of graphical detail in Faces of War. Everything looks sharp, from the gutted houses of a destroyed French village to the incredible detail on all the vehicles. The physics engine also lends itself to the over-the-top, cinematic feel of the battles. Explosions send bodies hurling into the air, and soldiers can get their helmets blown off. Soldiers will even drop their weapons if they're hit, which means you've got to have them pick up their weapons again or they'll try to punch their opponents. Finally, the AI is the glue that holds everything together. The good news is that it works most of the time, but that also means that it occasionally does dumb things. For instance, we've seen soldiers run into withering firefights and get shot a dozen times. We hope that this is one of the things that Best Way can work on while the game goes through development.

We've barely scratched the surface of Faces of War, as we've only seen two of the battles in action. The final game should have three full single-player campaigns, not to mention eight multiplayer modes with support for up to 16 players. If the two battles that we've seen thus far are any indication, Faces of War could very well be one of the first big surprises of 2006.