INTRO:
During the time of this game, there are few game-makers that are eager to exploit the events of World War II. Even fewer among these have sophisticated gameplay that can be considered as respectable homage.
Men of War attempts to be one such game. From playing the game, one would have the impression that the developers are very interested in the gruelling days of World of War and have implemented these in the gameplay quite well. However, the game is hardly accessible, still has bugs and has issues of presentation, especially in its writing for campaign missions.
TUTORIALS:
The game does have tutorials, but scatters them throughout the campaign missions. For example, most of the basics for controlling and handling units are taught through the first mission in the Soviet campaign. Yet, the basics for supplying and equipping individual soldiers are taught through the first mission in the German campaign.
They would have been more useful if they have been consolidated into a separate game mode.
Furthermore, the game does not have tutorials for more advanced gameplay, as will be mentioned later where relevant. Looking for documentation on these is also difficult, because the game does not have an in-depth manual and the game is too obscure for players to benefit from third-party guides and wikis.
Many of the nuances of the game can only be discovered by very inquisitive players. This would not have been an issue if not for the fact that learning these nuances is important in making the game easier to play.
CAMERA:
The camera is the first system in the game that the player is introduced to. This is fitting, as it is far more important than one would think.
Fortunately, the camera is easy to use because its controls follow most of the conventions for camera control in present-day RTS games. The control input for reorienting the camera freely in particular is always available, regardless of whether the player is commanding a unit or not.
Unfortunately, such frequent use of the camera controls also highlights issues with other aspects of the game. The player will discover that he/she has to compensate for the lack of user-friendliness in these other aspects with more visual examination of units and other objects than he/she would like.
USER INTERFACE & HOTKEYS:
To the developers' credit, they have created a highly customizable user interface.
The buttons in the virtual button pad on the lower right of the screen can be customized by duplicating the buttons in the toolbar at the centre of the user interface. There are also counters for ammunition that a unit has left and such other conveniences. There are also plenty of hotkeys for many commands in the game, and they are all customizable.
Unfortunately, as extensive as their designs are, the developers were not able to account for every possible action that a unit can do. There are many of these as will be described later where relevant.
INFANTRY & COVER:
Infantrymen are the core of the player's forces, especially when the player discovers how strangely versatile they are. Yet, they are also some of the weakest units.
Infantrymen, as to be expected of footsoldiers, are the tiniest and most fragile units on the battlefield, especially if they are caught in the open. However, if they are behind cover – any cover – that is facing incoming fire, the damage that they take from hits that land are significantly reduced.
If they are flanked and fired upon from angles where there is no cover to obscure them, they take full damage from hits. There are also other means of attack that circumvents cover, namely explosions from high-explosive rounds that happen to hit the ground beside them. Then, there are weapons that are specifically designed to kill infantry hiding behind cover, namely sniper rifles and mortars.
INFANTRY SKILLS:
Not any infantryman can use any hand-held weapon with great ease. His skill at using a hand-held weapon is depicted via diamond icons that appear over the icon in the UI for the primary weapon that he is using. The more diamonds that are filled, the better he is.
This skill is depicted in-game as his accuracy with the weapon. This is better seen when the player is directly controlling the soldier, as will be described later.
A soldier's skill with a hand-held weapon is hinted at through his designation. For example, a soldier that has been labelled in-game as "SMG Infantry" is likely to be best off mainly using submachineguns.
However, which weapons a soldier is good at using are actually determined through the soldier's animations. Returning to the example of the SMG Infantry, he is actually skilled at using any weapon that requires him to take the same posture as the one that he takes for when using his default weapon.
An example of the consequences of this design is that a Rifleman is actually just as good at using a sniper rifle or an anti-tank rifle as he is at using regular rifles. This is something that wily players would take advantage of.
Just because a soldier missed his shot, the shot does not disappear outright. It will land on something else and damage it. This also means that friendly fire is always an ever-present risk when bunches of soldiers are firing their weapons while being close to each other, though their A.I. scripts generally prevent such mishaps.
INFANTRY INVENTORY:
In the German campaign, the player learns early on that each footsoldier has his own inventory. This is where Men of War differentiates itself from many other RTS games.
Granted, such a system has been seen in Jagged Alliance and similarly inspired games, and may perhaps be more suitable in these. For Men of War, managing the inventory of individual soldiers can be too much for most players, especially when they are trying to conduct battles simultaneously.
On the other hand, this system does offer many nuances, such as having soldiers perform supply runs after having been relieved of any other gear to make space. A soldier can also carry around spare ammo or even weapons for another soldier to use. There are many possibilities, as long as the player is willing to experiment with them.
This versatility is balanced against by the inability to stack certain items, such as guns, within the inventory grid of a footsoldier.
HAND-HELD WEAPONS:
There are a handful of weapons that are often seen in the hands of infantrymen. Among these, submachine guns and rifles of various nations are the most common. Submachine guns are more suitable for short- to medium-ranged combat, but rifles are better than most other weapons at shooting far-away targets.
Next, there are machineguns, of which there are two varieties: general-purpose and heavy. General-purpose machineguns are usually mounted on vehicles, but they can be carried around by infantry, preferably those that have been trained as machine-gunners. Heavy machineguns are generally mounted on vehicles and are powerful enough to penetrate the armor of light vehicles, blow apart any piece of cover that is not rock or metal and kill infantry almost instantly.
Then, there are pistols and hand-guns, though they are not as handy as one would expect side-arms to be. They are not much faster to bring to bear than other weapons and does not have enough stopping power to kill enemy soldiers. However, among these, there are suppressed handguns, which are convenient for certain campaign missions.
The most disappointing infantry-borne weapons are the rocket launchers. These are so wildly inaccurate that they are unreliable to use at any range. They may be effective at very close ranges, but grenades are a lot handier in such scenarios. Furthermore, these launchers and their ammunition take up a lot of space.
Most of the differences among weapons of the same category but of different nations can be difficult to ascertain because of lack of documentation on their in-game statistics. Fortunately, magazine sizes are at least apparent. The game is not bashful about having certain weapons from certain nations being clearly superior to the weapons of other nations, but it does work in drawbacks.
For example, the Soviet PPSh-41 with the drum magazine has a much larger magazine size than most other submachine guns, but it has a noticeably longer reload period.
GRENADES:
Any person, even civilians, can hurl grenades with the same level of skill. There are five types of grenades in the game, but only three are supported by the game's user interface, which is unfortunate.
Two of these three grenades are commonly used. Frag grenades are intended to be used against infantry and the smaller of infantry-operated weapons, while anti-tank grenades are meant to be used against vehicles.
Frag grenades, when autonomously used by soldiers, are ineffective against enemy soldiers. Unless the latter are already suppressed, they are smart enough to pick up and toss the grenades away before diving for cover. This is because soldiers do not autonomously know how to 'cook' grenades, which will be described further later. Furthermore, frag grenades can bounce with gusto, especially when hitting hard ground, making them even less effective.
Anti-tank grenades detonate on impact, which is convenient. They are stupendously effective against armored vehicles too, often destroying light vehicles outright or knocking out any part of a heavy vehicle. This is perhaps a well-deserved advantage, because anti-tank grenades have far shorter throwing range than other grenades.
The third grenade that is supported in the U.I. is the smoke grenade. It has more to do with the system of field of view, which is described elsewhere.
Incendiary grenades and flare grenades have to be manually equipped in the secondary weapon slot of a soldier before they can be used. Flare grenades seems to have little gameplay significance beyond being used in certain scenarios in the campaign missions.
However, incendiary grenades are more useful, as they have effects that are strategically different from frag or anti-tank grenades. They are thrown as far as frag grenades, but detonate upon impact and set anything they hit on fire – including tanks. On the other hand, likely due to their effectiveness, they are rare in-game.
KNIVES & AXES:
Perhaps for the sake of adding novelty to certain campaign missions, there are knives and axes that infantrymen can use for sneaky kills.
Knives are used as thrown weapons, thus sharing the same slot with grenades. Any enemy soldier that is hit by a knife dies instantly, but not necessarily silently. Nevertheless, yelps and groans do not carry as far as gunshots. However, the accuracy of thrown knives strongly depends on range and whether the target is moving – these are factors that are not told to the player.
Interestingly, a knife bounces off its target after killing him, instead of being embedded in the corpse. This may be due to the limitation of the Gem game engine. This would not have been an issue, if not for the possibility of the knife falling onto or clipping through the corpse, which complicates the retrieval of the knife.
The axe is even more of a novelty than the knife, as it appears in only one campaign mission. However, interestingly, it can be used as both a throwing weapon and a primary weapon. As the latter, it can be used to bolster a regular melee attack.
INFANTRY STANCES, MOVEMENT & POSTURES:
A soldier can have up to three different stances, each with its own uses. By default, soldiers stand. This is one of the two positions with which they can move about with, e.g. walking, running and sprinting.
Next, there is a kneeling position, which is only useful when there are low pieces of cover. This is because there are no animations for crouch-walking, which also means that the soldier must spend time to transition from a kneeling position to a standing or prone position before he can even move. This can be irritating at times.
Lastly, the soldier can go prone, which he would do when bullets start flying. All infantrymen automatically hit the ground if they are under fire in the open, which is a believably impressive A.I. design. This is probably a life-saver too, because even if a soldier sprints to cover while under fire, he is more than likely to just get killed.
When he is prone, the soldier can crawl about, albeit very slowly. When he is either being prone or crawling about, he is a lot less likely to get shot. Moreover, he gains an accuracy bonus when firing from this stance.
Furthermore, crawling is the stealthiest way to move about, as the player would discover in stealth-oriented campaign missions. Enemies only spot a crawling soldier when he is close into half of their viewing distance. Even then, he must be within a narrow arc in front of them, though this is not told to the player.
As mentioned earlier, a footsoldier can walk, run or sprint. The walking animation is only ever exhibited by A.I.-controlled soldiers in the campaign missions, because player-controlled ones always run instead of walk when ordered to move about. Running does not tire the average infantryman, but sprinting does, as depicted by a stamina bar under his health bar in the user interface.
In addition to his stances and movement, an infantryman also has postures, which depict his current state of alertness. All soldiers start at ease by default, at least until violent commotions occur within earshot of him or in his field of view (more on these later).
Upon this, he takes out his gun and assumes combat-readiness. This may seem like a trivial mention, but this transition of animations actually takes a couple of seconds, which can be significantly long enough to matter, especially in the campaign missions.
Fortunately, the soldier can take out his gun when he is on the move. He may even switch to another weapon or holster it, or reload his gun. This is a fortunate design decision, because forcing the soldier to stay still while he is doing any of these would have been a mistake on the developers' part.
Infantrymen also have postures and animations for being suppressed. When a soldier comes under heavy fire, he might cower instead of firing back. There are different cowering animations for when the soldier is in the kneeling position or is standing behind cover. He stays in this posture for a while, before peeking out of cover again, unless the player forces him to perform an action with a double-clicked order.
This is the game's way of implementing suppression. However, as sophisticated as it is, this feature lacks any other visual aid. The player is likely to have the camera zoom out to its furthest to provide as much view of the battlefield as it can, so the postures can be difficult to notice.
INFANTRY HEALTH:
The health system for infantrymen has more nuances than their simple health bars suggest. Unfortunately, these nuances are not told to the player at all.
Certain observations about the health system are easy to make. For one, losing health does not appear to affect the performance of infantrymen. However, they do try to heal whenever there is down-time. This is an automated behaviour that can be inconvenient at times, as useful as it seems.
A soldier performs healing by breaking open a universal bandage package and applying its contents. This universal bandage is used by all factions, as unbelievable as this is (to a history buff, that is). Still, this is a convenient game design.
However, the healing animation is quite long, and the healing only triggers some time into it. As soon as the animation starts, the package is consumed, so if the infantryman is interrupted during this process, it is wasted. Moreover, the soldier takes a while to stop bandaging and draw his gun, so he is vulnerable during healing.
Each package can only heal up to 75% of a soldier's total health. Incidentally, soldiers attempt to heal when their health goes below 75%. Also, the player is not allowed to order soldiers to heal if their health has not dropped below 90%. All these are not told to the player, unfortunately.
If an infantryman does not get to heal via bandages, he is able to heal the subsequent 10%-wide section of his health bar over time, provided that he is out of combat. This process occurs very slowly though, so it is not practical.
MELEE ATTACKS:
Perhaps for the sake of novelty, there is a system of close-combat attacks for soldiers. These are generally impractical for use in anything other than a handful of campaign missions, but they at least make infantry more believable.
There are actually a few variations of melee attacks, though all of them require a soldier to stand. Which variation is used depends on what the soldier is holding at the time, but all of them has the secondary effect of knocking down the target (which has to be an enemy soldier, of course). The game does not inform the player of this.
The first variation, a kick, is performed when a soldier is holding a gun. Once the enemy is knocked down, he has a few seconds for some cheap shots. The second variation occurs when the soldier has nothing in his hands, in which case he performs an almighty punch that can take out almost 75% of the target's health. This can seem silly.
The third variation is the rarest, as the soldier must equip a substantially large melee weapon, which is only available in a few campaign missions. For this one, the soldier kills the target outright.
Melee attacks are perhaps only useful in single-player and even then only when enemies are trapped in buildings, which prevent them from deterring close-combat assaults.
Mishaps can occur if they are mingling , as soldiers can be mistakenly ordered to punch each other. There is some visual aid to help targeting, such as the target being highlighted, but this does not provide enough visual contrast when their models are clipping into each other.
INFANTRY-OPERATED WEAPONS:
In addition to weapons that are held in their hands, there are larger weapons that infantry can handle but not stuff into their roomy pockets. Generally, these weapons require at least two soldiers to operate: one to act as the gunner, the other as the loader or another auxiliary role.
Machinegun tripods or carriages, mortar tubes and anti-tank guns are the mobile ones among these, though mortars are described later as they work quite differently. Anyway, these can be lifted up and moved about elsewhere, preferably to more strategic positions.
The bigger they are, the slower they move. For example, machinegun tripods can be carried about quicker than most others, whereas 150 mm howitzer carriages are too much to be moved quickly. With that said, there is a lost opportunity for the developers to design a feature of convenience to allow more troops to help push the heavier of these weapons.
However, the heavier weapons can be linked onto trucks, armored cars and half-tracks (but not tanks) so that they can be towed about. This feature is further described in a later section.
The game does not inform the player that the larger-calibre gun carriages are considered in-game as heavy vehicles. This means that they can crash through obstacles like walls and razor-wire like armored vehicles can. This can seem absurd, considering that their momentum is only provided by two men.
Regardless, this can be exploited to make holes in walls so that infantry could move through them. However, the falling debris can injure the crewmen.
Anyway, returning to the matter of their intended functionality, machinegun tripods are intended for infantry suppression, which they particularly do well at if they are positioned to watch over open areas. Of particular noteworthiness is the Soviets' Maxim, which despite its poor performance and reach compared to machinegun tripods, only requires just one crewman. He also happens to adopt a prone position instead of standing, making him harder to take out.
Most machinegun tripods do not have protection for its operators, but there are versions with plated shields. These do block small arms fire, but has an adverse effect on field of views, which will be elaborated later.
Anti-tank guns, despite their name, can be used against infantry, as they can be loaded with high-explosive rounds. They often have plating that protects the crewmen from small arms fire, but otherwise they are useless against returning fire from their preferred prey, which are armored vehicles. On the other hand, most anti-tank guns have low profiles that make them difficult to hit.
Then, there are howitzers. These rare pieces of hardware have tremendous range and significant arcs to the trajectories of their shells. Most of them do not have armor-piercing rounds, however, though their regular munitions are often enough to knock out most vehicles.
There are versions of the abovementioned weapons that are static, meaning that they cannot be lifted and moved elsewhere. Incidentally, some of them are actually the same weapons, minus wheels or parts that could have made them mobile. Recognizing them is not a problem where the larger heavy weapons are concerned, but for smaller ones, such as machinegun stands, doing so can be difficult.
Static emplacements also have limited arcs of fire. Whereas the fully mobile ones can be rotated freely, these cannot. Fortunately, there are visual indicators for the arcs of fire.
There are static emplacements that are originally immovable. Chief amongst these are the German AA 20mm Flak guns, which can be astonishingly nasty when used against infantry and light vehicles.
However, it has to be mentioned here that the Germans' AA 20mm Flak guns may be disadvantaged against their Allied counterparts, which are mobile and require only one operator.
Interestingly, there is no skill system for the operation of these weapons, so any soldier can operate any of them with the same skill.
INFANTRY EXPLOITS & ODDITIES:
Any infantryman can use any weapon, no matter how cumbersome it is and regardless of whether he canonically had training in its use. He can also operate any vehicle. This can seem quite cheesy (but incidentally quite fun).
There are even more absurd consequences of this loophole. A soldier can actually take off the machinegun mount off a vehicle and use it. Of course, this is not a surprise if the machinegun is of the light or general-purpose sorts, like the MG-34, but having a soldier lugging the large, high-calibre Breda M37 can be a silly sight.
Furthermore, not every item in the game has believable sizes when they are placed into the inventory of an infantryman. For example, machineguns always take 5 X 2 slots each, but gas cans, which do have large in-game models, only take 2 X 2 slots each.
Yet, the inventory grid of an infantryman may be a tad too generous. Although his inventory does not allow the stacking of many items, he can carry mixtures of ammunition, some of which may seem absurd when compared to others. For example, while an infantryman can only carry so many clips of rifle rounds, he can carry thousands of machinegun rounds.
Still, such a haphazard design can be convenient when the player is having a soldier do ammo runs between the frontlines and supply dumps.
SNIPER RIFLES, MORTARS & ANTI-TANK RIFLES:
These particular infantry-wielded weapons have designs that are different from the others. Unfortunately, the game does not describe their use much, beyond text pop-ups with sometimes vague hints.
Soldiers that use sniper rifles need clear lines of sight to the target to shoot them. If the target's head is jutting out from behind cover, they can still target them. Any hit from a fully aimed sniper rifle, be it a headshot or body-shot, is immediate death.
Sniper rifles do require time to aim. This is depicted via the lines of a red crosshair gradually appearing over the target. A moment after it has fully appeared, the shot is fired and it is very likely to hit.
However, the aiming process can be disrupted, either by putting the sniper in distress or having the target move about abruptly, which causes the aiming process to reset. This is not told to the player.
Mortars have to be handled by a duo of soldiers. They are technically weapons with long range, but they also have terrible accuracy. This is perhaps understandable, because mortars are the only weapons that can be fired at steep trajectories and thus ignore most pieces of cover between them and their targets. However, to fire at longer ranges, the trajectories that mortar shells take have to be lowered, thus making them less effective at ignoring cover.
These designs are not told to the player. Of course it can be argued that the player who is already knowledgeable about mortars would know this, but this means that Men of War is quite inaccessible to players who are not.
Anti-tank rifles work very much like sniper rifles. Indeed, they can be used against infantry in the same way, though this would be a waste of their precious rare rounds. Instead, they are meant to be used against vehicles.
What the game doesn't tell the player is that anti-tank rifles have to go through the same aiming process for vehicles as the one for aiming at infantry. Yet, there does not appear to be any visual aid for this such as the one for sniping.
Nevertheless, the anti-tank rifle can separately target different parts of a vehicle. This is not of much importance against thinly armored light vehicles, which can be knocked out with a shot to the hull. However, against better-armored vehicles, namely tanks, the anti-tank rifle is most useful for damaging their tracks.
LIGHT VEHICLES:
There are plenty of light vehicles in the game. Light vehicles are typically thinly armored, such that even small arms fire can destroy, but a handful have enough armor to shrug these off.
The smallest light vehicles that are seen in the game are bikes with sidecars. They require two crewmen to work properly, as having just one requires the soldier to switch from the driver's seat to the gunner's seat. This forces him to either drive the bike or fire its mounted machineguns, but not both. The switching is hilariously instantaneous though, because there are not any transition animations for this purpose. The same quirk can also be seen in jeeps.
Next, there are armored cars. Their armor, which is proof against small-arms, makes them more useful at infantry-support than other similarly armed light vehicles.
Half-tracks have the most variety in armaments. There are half-tracks that are simply designed to carry troops around, with only a single machinegun mount for protection. Then, there are more heavily armed ones. For example, the Germans have a version with a mortar, while the Allies have one with an anti-tank gun.
There are a few other variants, but these are only ever seen in multiplayer.
There is a lost opportunity for more sophistication in the designs of light vehicles, most of which are open-topped. Passengers that are not already operating a mounted weapon merely sit where they are in these vehicles, apparently heedless of any mayhem around them. They could have added to the firepower of the vehicles that they are boarding by firing their weapons at enemies.
TANKS:
There are many tanks in Men of War, even for an RTS game. There are small tanks, such as the German Tankette, that are mainly intended for infantry support. Then, there are light tanks, such as the plucky M5 Stuart, which has the hybrid roles of infantry support and tank-flanking.
Next, there are the bigger tanks that are intended for general-purpose combat, such as the first-generation Panzer IV, T-34 and M4 Sherman. These so-called medium tanks have versions that are more heavily armed and which are intended to fight even nastier tanks.
These other tanks happen to be mostly German, such as the famous Panther and Tiger. The Allies and Soviets have their own counterparts, such as the heavily armored KV-85 and the long-ranged Pershing.
However, the Germans may have an imbalanced advantage by having access to so-called "super-heavy" tanks. Their King Tiger can be a headache to deal with, considering its very thick armor and accurate gun that makes flanking it difficult without sheer numbers. Their Jadgtiger is a lot easier to flank, being a typical tank destroyer with no turret, but it has the biggest tank gun in the game and practically penetrates any other vehicle.
The Germans also have tanks with the lowest profiles in the game, such as the aforementioned Tankette and their StuG III and Hetzer tank destroyers. Dealing with them on flat terrain can be a pain, as their armor are so steeply angled.
All these advantages shoehorn the opposing player into adopting predictable tactics when fighting these vehicles with their own tanks. Fortunately, the player can still resort to infantry with anti-tank grenades to compensate.
By default, tanks are crewed by tank crewmen, which make terrible footsoldiers. Yet, they can be replaced by actual footsoldiers with seemingly no loss in performance.
Most tanks require at least three crewmen each to operate with basic performance: a driver, a gunner and a loader. However, for full performance of a tank, it may need up to five, with one of the two additional tankers acting as the commander (which purportedly makes sure that the vehicle is operating at full efficiency) while the other operates the anti-aircraft mount, if any.
It is worth noting here that tanks do allow soldiers to hitch a ride, but these soldiers are merely sitting on its hull and are very vulnerable.
CIVILIAN/NON-COMBAT VEHICLES:
There are also unarmed vehicles that can be operated. The most prominent of these are trucks, which are intended for ferrying supplies around. They also happen to have inventories with the best space-to-size ratios (more on these shortly). However, as are typical of trucks, they are quite ungainly and can actually tip over and be rendered useless if not driven carefully. Moreover, they are easy to destroy.
There are other non-combat vehicles, but they are mainly there for novelty's sake. For example, there are refuelling trucks, but they lack the function to refuel vehicles. Similarly, there are automobiles, but these are only ever seen in action in the campaign missions.
On the other hand, considering the inventory system for vehicles that will be explained shortly, they can be used for entertaining shenanigans.
PINTLE/SWING-MOUNTED WEAPONS:
Almost all vehicles have pintle- or swing-mounted weapons. The latter usually serve as anti-aircraft mounts. These require their operators to expose themselves to enemy fire, but they do make their vehicles much more difficult to be flanked by infantry, especially the swing-mounts. Furthermore, weapons that are mounted in this way can be brought to bear more quickly than most other weapons.
However, the game does not inform the player that these mounted weapons are counted as actual items in the inventory system of vehicles, instead of built-in weapons. The vehicles are actually "equipping" these items, like infantrymen would.
This is perhaps intended by the developers as a way for soldiers to dismount these weapons and carry them around. Indeed, this can be done, sometimes to silly effect. However, certain mounted weapons are best off left in their vehicles.
Furthermore, as long as they have not been dismounted, they can be swapped with other similar weapons, even if they are historically incompatible.
TOWING HEAVY WEAPONS:
As mentioned earlier, heavy weapons can be connected to certain light vehicles so as to hitch a ride. The vehicles do move noticeably slower when towing, but the size of the heavy weapons does not appear to have significant effect. In fact, some of the inertia of the heavy weapons is conveniently ignored, especially when the vehicle turns.
However, this does not mean that the heavy weapon is immune to collisions. Indeed, if the towing vehicle is not careful about the turns it makes (and it usually is not), the heavy weapon can be damaged when it smashes into walls. The crewmen can also be damaged by the falling debris.
Speaking of the crewmen, a nuance of towing is that the crewmen of the heavy weapon, if there are any, sit on its legs, sharing the ride. However, they are completely defenceless. Moreover, the player cannot directly control them until the towing vehicle has released the heavy weapon. In fact, the player cannot even select the heavy weapon when the vehicle is towing it, because the game considers them as the same unit.
VEHICLE INVENTORY:
Vehicles also have their own inventory systems, but these are far more generous than those for infantry – perhaps too generous.
Vehicle inventories accommodate much larger stacks. Even guns can be stacked, provided that they are loaded with the same amount of ammo in their magazines (otherwise they exist as separate stacks, thus wasting space).
Different vehicles have different sizes for their grids and different limits to stacks. As mentioned earlier, trucks have the most generous space, though tanks also have quite a lot of space (which can seem odd to some tank buffs).
Infantry-operated heavy weapons are considered as having vehicle inventories too, despite not logically having any space to store items with. This can be exploited, such as using machinegun tripods to perform faster transfers of items between crates and vehicles.
A vehicle that has been wrecked may still contain its inventory. One visual indicator of this is that the hull is still intact with its tracks still mostly there. This means that they can still be looted, though not repaired.
BLUEPRINT & ARMOR CONDITION:
When vehicles are selected, top-down blueprints take the place of unit portraits that are used for infantry in the U.I.
If any part of a vehicle is shaded with any colour other than the default tan or beige, it is in trouble. Worrisome red indicates the part is damaged, but it can still be repaired by any soldier with a repair kit. The more undesirable shading is grey, which denotes that the part has been completely destroyed.
This blueprint display does not depict a vehicle's durability thoroughly, however. For example, the blueprint does not show the state of the armor of an armored vehicle. As it engages in battle, the armor can be battered into much reduced effectiveness. To compensate, the player has to visually examine the model of an armored vehicle.
FUEL:
Unlike many other RTS games with World War II settings, Men of War does not do away with fuel considerations for vehicles. All vehicles require fuel to move about, without which they are all but immobile. However, turrets can still be rotated without any fuel, so vehicles without fuel are not entirely defenceless. The player can see the progress of the consumption of fuel via a bar next to the blue-print of the vehicle.
There is a way for vehicles to refuel, but the game does not make this convenient, or even clear.
Firstly, a soldier must locate a gas can or a fuel barrel. The former holds less fuel but can be carried in his inventory, making it the more useful of the two. The soldier must equip either fuel container before he can do anything with it, and it happens to make him very slow on the move.
Afterwards, the soldier has to approach a vehicle to draw fuel from it or refill it. He can only interact with vehicles or wrecks of vehicles; even if there are what appear to be fuel tanks lying around in maps, he cannot draw fuel from them.
Having him use a fuel container on a vehicle also reveals another issue. When the fuel container is not full, the only action that the soldier can perform is to draw fuel from the vehicle into the container. He can only fill a vehicle with fuel if the container is completely full, which is a very odd and cumbersome context-sensitive action.
More importantly, there does not appear to be any adequate tutorial for this. There is one campaign mission that features a gas can, but it does not provide any instruction that mention any of the above.
VEHICLE ODDITIES & COMPLICATIONS:
An odd design about vehicles is that they can examine objects with inventories, like infantry can. This can be exploited to have vehicles examine containers and make wholesale transfers of items, all in a ludicrous instant.
However, vehicles are considered as ramming things that they come into contact with. In the case of containers like crates and boxes, they are destroyed, possibly eliminating their contents too. There is a small window of time when the vehicle can loot the container, but this can only be exploited in single-player, where there is a pause feature and tool to slow down time.
Vehicles can get caught in geometries of buildings and even other vehicles. Ironically, this is due to their inability to clip through each other, not even a little, which contrasts greatly with the ability of infantrymen to mingle.
The player can attempt to directly control the vehicles to extricate them, but these collision issues actually occur more often, or become more apparent, when the player is doing so.
Fortunately, the path-finding scripts of vehicles prevent such mishaps from occurring too often, because the scripts have the vehicles actively avoiding obstacles. However, that is not saying that their path-finding scripts are convenient. In fact, they can be quite idiotic at times.
The main problem with vehicle path-finding scripts is that when the player directs a vehicle across the path of another that is close by, they can become hopelessly confused. They try to make way for each other, thus causing a lot of delays as they shuffle about.
Different vehicles also have different policies when it comes to walls and buildings. Although vehicles will not crash through buildings, even if they can, they are more than alright with crashing through walls.
INVENTORY AUTO-ARRANGE:
The inventory systems do have the feature of auto-arranging, but it is not conveniently usable. Auto-arranging can only be invoked by attempting to shift the entire inventory of one participant of an exchange to that of the other.
A dedicated control input for auto-arranging that can be used outside of exchanges would have been much welcome. In fact, the scripts for the auto-arrangement are quite efficient, so it can be disappointing that the developers have not implemented them more pervasively.
AMMUNITION:
Men of War requires the units under the human player's control to have the ammunition necessary to fire their weapons. Therefore, running out of ammunition is a constant worry.
Although there are the systems of inventory and the many type of weapons that units can use, the developers were fortunately wise enough to simplify ammunition to a manageable level of complexity, though at the cost of authenticity of course.
Hand-held weapons of the same category share the same ammunition type. This means that soldiers can loot the corpses of soldiers of other nations for the latter's ammunition.
On the other hand, the game does not inform the player of a few certain designs of ammunition, likely because these were implemented late into the game.
For one, handguns appear to use rifle or SMG ammunition, depending on their model. Although there may be historical facts to justify this, the categorizing of ammunition yet the lack of a category for handgun ammo can make this seem odd.
Another oddity that the game does not explain well is that there are two types of ammunition for machineguns – one for general-purpose machineguns and the other for large-calibre ones - but both share the same name. Of course, one can argue that the differences in their icons, models and item sizes should be enough for differentiation, but this overlook of their naming strongly suggests loose quality control on the part of the developers.
The game is not so generously convenient when designing types of ammunition for cannons. These are mainly categorized according to their calibre. As there are many cannons of different calibre in the game, there can be mind-bogglingly many of these, from small 20-mm and 37-mm shells to huge 93-mm and 150-mm ones.
As the various nations used cannons of different calibre, vehicles can only reliably obtain spare ammo by looting other vehicles of their own nation – or their wrecks.
That is not to say that the few commonly shared calibres are a convenience. In fact, they can pose a balance issue. For example, certain Allied tanks use the 75-mm shell for their comparatively less powerful 75-mm cannons, whereas, the Germans use the same shell for their considerably more fearsome ones.
Managing ammunition could have been easier if the game has scripts to allow units to automate the looting of ammunition from containers, wrecks of vehicles and corpses.
FIELD OF VIEW:
The player can see the entire battlefield when he/she loads up the map. However, the positions of enemies are not always visible by default, though most campaign missions give the player these.
On the other hand, once units under the player's control have spotted previously undiscovered enemies in their field of view, the latter are shown on the map indefinitely. The exception is a certain patrolling guard in the first mission of the Allied campaign.
Yet, even though the player may be able to see enemy units, his/her own units may not necessarily see them too. This is because each unit has its own field of view and it can only see enemy units that happen to saunter into it.
The player can see this field of view in action when he/she clicks on an enemy unit; this is of great importance in stealth-oriented campaign missions. This field of view shifts as the unit moves. It even bobs around when footsoldiers look to the left and right, which is a nice touch.
Oddly enough, the player cannot see the fields of view of his/her own units in the same manner. Instead, the player needs to turn on the fog of war graphical option to see these projected onto the battlefield.
Footsoldiers have the widest field of view, but they of course do not have eyes in the back of their heads. The crewmen of vehicles have their fields of view narrowed by the confines of their vehicles, especially for tanks. However, certain tanks, such as the M4 Sherman and its variants, have many view slits that grant them surprisingly wide arcs of view, if they have enough crewmen of course.
Even if units cannot see incoming threats, they can still be warned in other ways. One of these is to have nearby comrades spot them, after which they are automatically made aware. Another way is for them to hear the gunfire that are coming from out-of-sight enemies, but this means that they may already be too late to respond. Units are also understandably made aware of the presence of enemies that are firing on them, even if they are behind walls and buildings.
Smoke and flare grenades create palls of gas that obstruct the field of view of anything. However, they take a while to generate enough gas. There is no visual aid for when they are most effective and are dissipating, unfortunately.
DIRECT CONTROL:
One of the most peculiar features of Men of War is the player's ability to take over control of a single unit. This may seem interesting, but it is not as practical as its official description suggests.
When taking over a footsoldier, the player is given controls that are akin to a twin-stick shooter. The directional controls that were previously used for scrolling the map now moves the soldier in the corresponding direction, with respect to the camera's orientation. Meanwhile, the player can have him aim his gun, if any, by using the mouse. He cannot aim at anything behind him, of course, at least not without turning around.
The soldier adopts a stance that lets him shoot even while moving around, but he suffers a tremendous reduction to his movement speed, as well as penalties to his accuracy when moving. This makes the direct control of a soldier a highly situational tool.
There are also issues over the controls for cycling through his weapons. By default, the player uses the right-click of the mouse, but this is only useful if the soldier does not have many weapons on his person.
Direct control is the only way a soldier can be forced to 'cook' a grenade. That is, the player can have him arming and holding it for a few seconds so that it is more likely to detonate when it lands after being thrown. Of course, carelessness on the player's part results in the grenade blowing up in the poor possessed soldier's own hands.
Upon taking over a vehicle, the controls that are given to the player depends on its type of traction. For a vehicle that uses tyres, including half-tracks, the controls are similar to those used for games that involve the driving of automobiles.
Considering the often hectic battlefield of Men of War, driving such a vehicle around can be hazardous, especially in the confines of a city. Moreover, such vehicles tend to have only a single weapon, so they are not versatile enough for many roles.
Tanks are a lot more fun to drive around. This is mainly because of their ability to rotate on the spot (though historically, only a few tanks in World War II were able to do this, due to limitations in design or operator skill), and their potent weaponry. However, tanks are typically slow and clumsy, with the exception of certain small but very fast light tanks.
AIMING:
Regardless of whether an armed unit is under the control of the player or has been left autonomous, it must aim in order to fire accurately.
For better or worse, Men of War uses a cone-based system that is luck-dependent in order to simulate accuracy. This cone is narrow when the unit is aiming at close ranges, but it becomes bigger the further it aims, depicted by a growing vertical circle that is the 'base' of the invisible cone.
Shots fired by the unit can 'land' anywhere on the circle. There does not appear to be any Gaussian distribution to the shots, meaning that a shot is as likely to land on the periphery of the circle as it is on the centre.
This luck-based system may well put off players who despise factors of luck.
If there is any consolation for missed shots from cannons, it is that every shot that has been fired – on-target or not – increases the accuracy of the next shot by making the circle shrink. This is rationalized in-game as gunners using previous shots to 'find the range' of their target, to use a jargon in artillery operation. However, this shrinking stops after about three shots.
There is a spot of light that appears at the centre of the circle. Its colour denotes whether the target is obscured or not, though this is not clearly explained to the player. If it is blue, the target is out in the open and can be reliably hit. If it is orange, the target is partially obscured.
If it is red, the target is fully obstructed by cover; a yellow spot appears at where the line-of-fire is obstructed. However, the red spot is also used for when the weapon that the player is aiming cannot fire, such as when it is reloading. This can cause some confusion for the inexperienced player.
The icon that is used for the cursor denotes which weapon is being used. For example, an icon that looks like a scope denotes that the weapon is a rifle, whereas three ominously arranged triangles denote that the weapon is a cannon.
Bars underneath the icon appear when the weapon has to be reloaded. They change colour to depict the progress of the reloading process. However, oddly enough, such visual aid does not appear when the player is not in direct control of a unit. If it does, it would have made for a welcome convenience.
Instead, the player has to make do with the relatively unhelpful blinking of the icons for primary and secondary weapons in the user interface. Yet, they also happen to blink while they are in actual use, e.g. being fired, which can cause confusion.
MAP DESIGNS:
The battlefields in Men of War have many designs that are not seen even in RTS games of high production values. Almost anything solid can be destroyed and/or used as cover, be it an intact building or the pieces of rubble after it has collapsed. Even the pieces of rubble can be further broken apart.
The most interesting design of these battlefields is that powerful explosives do not just create decals of craters. These craters are actual pits in the ground, which provide handy cover for infantry but foil vehicles trying to move across them.
In almost any map, there are pre-existing containers such as crates and boxes that may have supplies in them. They are not reliable means of storage though, as they are easily destroyed. With the exception of certain campaign missions, anything in them is lost when they are broken apart by gunfire. Otherwise, their contents are tossed all over the place, which can be a chore to gather.
Yet, not every design of the battlefield is as satisfyingly sophisticated. Wrecks of vehicles stay for a while, a testament to the carnage of war. Wrecks can even be pushed around by tanks as make-shift cover. However, this nuance is wasted, because after a while they will fade away. Similarly, corpses linger only for a while, except in stealth-oriented scenarios where they linger indefinitely.
These designs are likely a failsafe by the developers included to prevent a session from taking too much computing overhead. Yet, this damages the authenticity of the game and limits any tactics oriented around looting.
A.I. DESIGNS:
The campaign missions are perhaps the most interesting aspect of Men of War, so it is fortunate that the game has a decently competent A.I. to challenge the player with. There are also accommodations for the A.I. of units both under the player's and the computer's control, which make the soldiers in Men of War some of the most believable to be seen in the RTS genre.
Depending on the campaign mission, the A.I. can be either cautious or tenacious. If it notices that an attack has stalled and all heavy elements of its forces, namely its armored vehicles, have perished, it has surviving infantry holding back their assaults and waiting behind cover for an opportunity. If it notices that the player's forces that are keeping them at bay is pre-occupied with something else or is seemingly retreating, it order its troops to advance.
This makes the A.I. a surprisingly daunting opponent when attrition of the player's forces is not desirable, and this just happens to be so in many campaign missions where the player is on the defence.
However, the A.I. has many flaws. For example, when on the attack, it does not seem to know when to hold back and reserve its heavier elements for a massed attack. More often than not, it sends them piece-meal to be destroyed, or even stolen. Yet, it is oddly wise enough to hold back infantry, as mentioned earlier.
Another apparent example of a flaw is that the A.I. does not seem to be knowledgeable about the facing of its armored vehicles. It does not know that it is better off having its vehicles facing enemies with their frontal armor. Of course, the same flaw also applies to armored vehicles under the player's control, but at least the player can micro-manage their orientation.
Yet, the A.I. does have some unfair advantages, such as waivers on fuel and ammunition consumption. In most, if not all, campaign missions, the vehicles under its control do not appear to run out of fuel. Its units have to reload magazines, but they draw from unlimited ammunition reserves.
This may have been intended so that battles that are supposed to be epically fierce remain so in campaign missions. However, once the player has realized this, he/she may have the impression that the developers are not entirely devoted towards making the game authentic.
Footsoldiers have the bulk of the A.I. scripts for individual units, especially if they are allowed to move freely and fire at will. They automatically occupy cover positions that work best against the threat that they are facing, as well as target enemies that they are equipped to handle. If any enemies come too close for comfort, they use the appropriate grenades to deal with them. They also switch stances to whichever is the most convenient.
Such behaviours make the footsoldiers in Men of War some of the most believable to be seen in RTS games. However, these are better appreciated in any game mode other than the campaign missions, because these A.I. scripts cause footsoldiers to blow through ammunition quickly, which is undesirable in missions. They are not bright enough to loot corpses either, though they are smart enough to grab loose items on the ground.
Unfortunately, vehicles are not as smart as footsoldiers – especially if they are allowed to move about. They can well move out of cover and expose their sides and rear. They also continue to shoot at an armored target that they cannot penetrate. The scripts that determine whether they use their cannons or their machineguns (if they have both) are also not entirely clear.
MINI-MAP:
The mini-map in Men of War can be toggled on or off, resized and repositioned. There are even more options, such as its translucency. However, it does not show any detail beyond what can be considered prevalent practices in the designs of mini-maps for RTS games.
To elaborate, the mini-map does provide the essentials, such as separate icons for footsoldiers and vehicles, and different colours for allies and enemies. However, it does not show whether the icon for a vehicle is actually a motorized machine or an infantry-operated heavy weapon. It also does not show the location of item containers.
The mini-map is perhaps adequate for multiplayer matches, but not campaign missions where micromanagement is important.
COLLISIONS:
The most believable yet infuriating aspect of the game is its scripting for collisions.
Collision detection can be all over the place. While collisions of armoured vehicles with buildings and walls are believable and occur without problems, collisions with smaller things can be problematic.
For one, anti-tank mines do not sometimes trigger even when vehicles have obviously moved over them. Indeed, a vehicle can pass over a mine harmlessly, yet the next vehicle cannot move over the same mine without blowing up. Of course, one can argue that this may be the game's attempts at implementing dud explosives, but the game does not clearly inform the player whether there is such a mechanism or not.
The most frustrating collisions are perhaps those involving towed heavy weapons. The vehicles that tow them do not have the A.I. scripts to tow them about safely without them hitting walls and other things.
On the other hand, when collisions are to the player's benefit, they can be quite fun. For example, massive tanks can actually destroy lighter vehicles by simply barging into them. However, vehicles can only ram when they are under the direct control of the player. Still, there are ways outside of direct control to create gratifying collisions, such as having armored vehicles crash through walls that enemy infantry are cowering behind.
However, armored vehicles, by default, do not attempt to crash through buildings, even if they can. This is because the falling debris can damage the vehicle, as well as the crewmen that are manning the anti-aircraft mounts.
CAMPAIGN:
The campaign mode makes use of particularly harrowing scenarios in real-life World War II. Whether the missions are authentic or not is debatable, but they are indeed quite difficult, especially if the player plays them in ways that the developer intended. The missions where the player is on the defence can be particularly harrowing.
In the campaign missions, the player has to micromanage his/her units to keep them well-supplied and alive, thus suppressing their autonomous A.I. However, the player can still see these in the allied units that are under the control of the A.I. The fierce fighting between A.I.-controlled units can be a spectacle.
There are stealth-oriented missions in between the ones that involve thunderous battles. These missions are where the systems of fields of view and infantry postures shine, as the player will be utilizing these to succeed in them.
There is also a mission in the Allied Campaign that mimics a rail-shooter title by utilizing the system of direct control. Although it is not always convincing, it is surprisingly functional and fun.
Mission conditions are according to the difficulty chosen. For example, choosing "Easy" for a mission may give the player a heavy tank instead of a light one.
Unfortunately, the campaign missions also feature some of the worst designs of Men of War. Amongst these is the writing for the mission briefings and de-briefings and the voice-overs of the campaigns' protagonists, which can come off as embarrassingly poor.
BUGS:
Unfortunately, the latest build of the game, which was released back in 2010, still has a lot of bugs.
Some of these are game-breaking bugs, such as objectives being completed for no reason, which is a rare and random occurrence. One particularly bothersome game-breaking bug occurs in the final mission of the Allied campaign. It prevents the mission from being completed, likely because enemies that the player must eliminate do not spawn into the map properly. The same mission also has another bug that ironically causes the mission to be completed prematurely.
Another infuriating bug is the one that prevents the player from using all of the mines at his/her disposal in the second Soviet campaign mission.
Then, there are silly bugs, such as vehicles sometimes losing the drawback of needing fuel when a game is reloaded while they are moving about. Occasionally, a few units may gain unlimited ammo as the magazines in their weapons fail to deplete.
Flamethrowers ignore cover, as to be expected of flamethrowers. However, they are not believable when the jets of fire go through vertical stone walls, which are apparently considered the same as other pieces of cover that flamethrowers ignore.
Incidentally, there had been many patches that fixed far worse problems. Yet, that there are still lingering bugs strongly suggest that the developers do not have interest in maintaining long-term technical support for their products.
MULTIPLAYER:
Not to be left out of club of present-day RTS games, Men of War has a multiplayer mode. For better or worse, it can only be played using the GameSpy online service.
It is mainly oriented around team-based gameplay, due to the infrastructure of income and score that entire teams share, as will be described later.
The match types include variants of king-of-the-hill, such as Battlezone, which has multiple objective locations, and Frontlines, which require one team to hold onto its territory while capturing the other's. There are also very familiar match types, such as 'Valuable Cargo' (which is really just capture-the-flag) and 'Combat' (vanilla deathmatch).
Completing the objectives contributes points towards a team's score. The host of a match can set the target score for a team to achieve victory.
Unless specified by the host, a player can summon reinforcements from a list of units that is unique to his/her chosen faction. These choices are limited by a pool of points and the rate at which the points replenish. Both are set by the host, after deliberation with players in the match lobby.
Some of the game's sophistication, such as the autonomy of units, are best savoured in multiplayer. Watching units attempt to flank and eliminate enemies that are also doing the same can be exhilarating.
Yet, the other gameplay elements, especially those that concern micromanagement, are irrelevant in multiplayer. Any time that a player spends on micromanagement of units is far better being spent on ordering them into strategic positions.
The objectives of a map and the strategies to achieve them encourage players to be a lot less conservative, sacrificing units to weaken the enemy's ground control and nonchalantly bringing in replacements. For example, a king-of-the-hill match tends to have players flooding an objective location with tough units, even if they could have been used with more finesse elsewhere.
Perhaps to the chagrin of players who rather seem more value in the single-player mode, many units in the game are only ever seen in multiplayer, such as the Soviet IS series tanks. Multiplayer is also where the bulk of the game's content updates went to, especially new maps and factions.
Perhaps the most interesting multiplayer mode is co-op. Some of the campaign missions have multiplayer variants that pit a team of players against the A.I., sometimes with different conditions seen in the original versions. They can be fun, provided that the team is coordinated.
GRAPHICS & SOUNDS:
Men of War's graphics were hardly cutting-edge by its time. Illustrative examples include the lack of secondary animations for units, such as infantrymen having no breathing animations and vehicles lacking believable vibrations.
However, the graphics compensate by being more of functional purpose than cosmetic. For example, the more decals of holes and dents that appear on the textures of an armored vehicle, the more battered its armor.
Of course, such graphical designs require the player to perform qualitative visual assessment of units, while also requiring the game to be played with the highest text