Men of Valor: Vietnam Impressions

With Medal of Honor, developer 2015 established new levels of immersiveness for first-person shooters. The World War II-based action game put you, among other places, on Omaha Beach during D day to a degree that it felt like you were in the middle of the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan. With Men of Valor: Vietnam, 2015 hopes to do the same thing with the Vietnam War. We had the chance to check out the Xbox version of Men of Valor at the Game Developers Conference.

In Men of Valor, you get to play as a young marine named Dean Shepherd, an African-American from Oklahoma. Set from 1965 to 1968, the game will cover major events, such as the Siege of Khe Sanh and the battle for Hue in the Tet Offensive.

2015 showed us one of the major battles in the game. You start off in an armored personnel carrier, rumbling across the countryside. Inside, your fellow marines are making small talk while a stereo booms out Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" (the soundtrack will include seven or eight classic songs from the era). The APC grinds to a halt, and a voice tells you that your squad has to get out to walk to the objective. As soon as you exit, gunfire erupts from the surrounding rice paddies, and the guy in front of you goes down from a headshot. After that, you'll engage in a nonstop running battle with the Vietcong. Artillery rounds will scream overhead before exploding, bullets will zing by your head, and the Vietcong will scream obscenities at you while they fire. Your buddies will go down, and it's up to you to bandage them or provide covering fire while another marine tries to carry the wounded man to cover. As you can probably tell, it makes for a very intense experience.

We were also shown an urban level, set in the gutted city of Hue. We're told that this level will have lots of gritty urban combat and plenty of snipers. That reminded us of the dreaded Sniper Town level from Medal of Honor that virtually everyone who played the game despised. In Sniper Town, you couldn't advance a few feet without getting your head blown off. John Whitmore, 2015's vice president and director of development, told us that you won't have to worry about that kind of situation in Men of Valor. The key to the game is to identify locations that provide cover from enemy fire. If you advance from cover to cover, you'll be safe. You can then lean out from cover to shoot the enemy. You'll have the full arsenal of US and Vietnamese weapons at your disposal, and the M79 grenade launcher can make short work of enemy snipers, which is quite satisfying.

The Xbox version of the game played very smoothly and kept a high frame rate, even during chaotic moments with lots of stuff going on. There are also lots of pretty graphical effects, such as heat blur coming off of fires and plenty of smoke and dust in the air from explosions. The Xbox version will support cooperative multiplayer, and it will support up to 16 players on Xbox Live. In addition, the Xbox version will have extra multiplayer and single-player maps that the PC version won't have. Development is on schedule, and Men of Valor is expected to ship for the PC and Xbox later this year.