Poor graphics and awful movement and game play give this the distinction of one of my top 5 worst fps of all time.

User Rating: 2 | Men of Valor PC
Wow. Paid about $8 for this and even that small amount wasn't worth it. Out of the 80 or so FPS games I've played, Men of Valor is one of the worst. I have to go way back to IGI2 before I find a game this bad.

First the good. The music is fine.

Now the bad.

Graphics: When I first popped this in my rig, I thought I had a defective disc. The graphics were awful. I went to the video options and turned everything up to maximum. No difference. I thought I went back to the late 1990s. It reminded me of the first Turok game. I was stunned that this was a 2004 effort.

Character models are laughably bad and wooden and they GLIDE across the ground as if the whole environment is made out of ice. It reminded me of my little plastic soldiers I used to play with when I was a child. I just pushed them across the ground.

Story and Characters: The Vietnam story is compelling and the various cut scenes with footage which gives a mini-history lesson on the war is okay. But the actual missions in the game are forgetful. The effort to try to connect with Shepherd, the main character, via letters home really doesn't work. In fact, I usually cut those off because they became boring very quickly.

Movement: Moving is really awful. You get stuck on just about everything - rocks, logs, limbs, boxes, bodies. Nothing is moveable. Every level is narrowly encased in an invisible barrier. You think you can take a path to flank hostiles only to bump into an invisible wall which blocks that path. Only one narrow and lineal pre-determined path is allowed and scripted. You can't jump. Even the smallest of logs you're locked behind. This is one of the poorest games I've played for trying to traverse the terrain.

Gameplay: Awful. This is really bad, folks. The whole game is about 12-14 hours. However, at least HALF of that time is replaying the same thing over and over. Save points are far apart and, often, you will tediously and slowly make your way up a path or river, systematically eliminating the hostiles along the way, only to find yourself ambushed (which, by the way, is scripted in there toward the end of every objective) and you die (very quickly). When you respawn, you're ALL THE WAY back at the beginning of the objective -- which sometimes were as far back as 20 minutes of gameplay. If you try to go any faster the second try, you'll die, so you have to go slowly and systematically through the same routine all over again. When you get at the hard section, you at least know what to expect and you can plan for a counter-attack. Sometimes, however, you're not successful on the second try and back you go for another 15 minutes re-do. It became OLD very quickly. I think the worst one took me about six tries to finally make it though at about 10 minutes per try. So, it took over an hour of playing to work my way through a 10 minute section.

Having a challenging objective is one thing. But to have a boring tedious re-doing of 20 minutes of work over and over with objective after objective is absolutely ridiculous. The result was a game that just wasn't fun. In fact it was painfully frustrating and boring. I think the developers wanted to make a game that evoked the "reality" of the Vietnam War. But the result was a game that wasn't fun to play.

Overall: 2 out of 10. Men of Valor makes my top 5 worst FPS games of all time