Men of Valor

An estimated 600 million dollars of damage was caused in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, at a total cost to the United States of America of 6 billion dollars.

I was not aware of this fact one week ago. But then, one week ago, I hadn't played Men of Valor before. Yes, it's amazing what you can learn from a simple loading screen.

Men of Valor is the latest First Person Shooter (FPS) game from 2015, the Developers of the WWII FPS Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, and released by Vivendi Universal. Set during the Vietnam War, Men of Valor puts you in the role of an American Marine as you fight your way through one of the defining conflicts of the 20th century, from the early beginnings of active American involvement, and up to the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Having played a previous FPS set during the Vietnam War, I was eagerly looking forward to this release and keen to see what the creators of MOH:AA would do with a more modern war. Until a couple of years ago, the Vietnam War was a taboo topic for games developers, on the basis that it was not only a defeat for the United States, but an all too recent defeat at that, and a controversial war to start with. The subject of the Vietnam war can still touch a raw nerve or two with veterans, but the genie has well and truly been unbottled since the release of FPS games like Vietcong, Battlefield: Vietnam and the Real-Time Strategy game based on the film Platoon.

This review covers the PC version of the game, which was released simultaneously alongside the X-Box edition.

I won't dwell too much on how an FPS game like this works as there's nothing particularly revolutionary here. If you've played one before, you can literally jump straight into playing this one without even looking at the manual (I know I did). As the term FPS implies - whilst you are onscreen you are standing in the shoes of your character, looking through his eyes, controlling his movements by use of the keyboard or joystick. By moving the mouse about you can look around you, from side to side, up or down and most importantly, aim your weapon. Your character can also crouch or lay prone - settings can be adjusted to determine whether crouching or crawling is toggled on or off or if you are required to hold down the relevant key to maintain the position. Keys for every command are totally customisable which is nice to see.

To the top left of your screen, a compass indicates the direction of your next objective. Below this at the bottom left is your health indicator (more of that later) and above this (when applicable) an indicator will show whether you are in a crouched or prone position. In the centre, a targeting reticule helps you aim. This reticule also flashes red to indicate from which direction you are being hit if someone off your screen has fired at you.

To the bottom right, the name of the weapon you are currently holding is displayed along with an ammunition count for remaining rounds in the weapon and spare rounds available.

Important messages for your mission (objectives etc.) appear as text in the upper portion of the screen and you will also occasionally see urgent red text appearing at the bottom - for example to warn you that a grenade is incoming!

Firing your weapon is easy, clicking on the left mouse button will do that nicely for you, or you can click on the right hand mouse button to aim down the sights of your weapon if accuracy is called for. Interestingly in a neat contextual change, whilst you are aiming your weapon, the keys that are normally assigned to moving your character left or right will actually lean you in those directions. I thought this was a great touch - for one thing, it's two less keys to learn or assign. Again, as with the crouch and prone commands, aiming down the sights of your weapon can either be set up as a straight toggle or if you will only aim for as long as you hold that button down.

Weapon fire rates can also be selected - for those weapons capable of automatic fire, there's a toggle key that will activate full automatic or single-shot mode. Single-shot mode can be useful if you want to conserve ammunition or if you just pride yourself on accuracy.

Changing weapons is simple if you have a wheelmouse, all you need to do is scroll up or down to select a new weapon from your arsenal. Nice and easy, and the available weapons cycle around for you as well, so no stopping once you get to the "top" of the list - but beware, you can only carry up to four weapons at a time. Reloading your weapon requires a keypress, although if you are running low, you don't have to wait for the magazine to be empty before reloading, you can essentially do this at any time, as long as you have some remaining ammunition with you.

Weapons available to you at the start include the M14 rifle, M79 grenade launcher and fragmentation grenades to hurl at the enemy. In addition, when and if you run out of ammo' for your chosen weapon, you can always swap one of your weapons for another by simply grabbing one from one of your dead enemies. Due to the fact that you are limited to four weapons at any one time, you might as well ditch any weapons for which you have no ammunition and carry something useful. The Soviet-built PPSH41 is one of my favourites. Although it's not as accurate as your standard issue rifle, it has an insane rate of fire and a large magazine capacity. Once you pick up one of these, you can almost always grab some more ammo' from a nearby corpse to keep you going.

Later in the game, as you progress through the war, you can unlock more modern weapons such as the ubiquitous M16 Assault Rifle and/or steal more advanced weapons such as AK47s from the enemies you encounter. There are also fixed weapons emplacements that you can take control of.

Running out of ammunition is, of course, Very Bad. But fear not! If absolutely necessary, you can continue to use your weapon as a blunt instrument - by pressing fire with an empty weapon (or the "M" key if you still have some ammunition left), you can strike out at any nearby enemies and smash their virtual skulls in. Lovely!

Generally speaking, unless you are crouched or crawling, moving your character through the game environment is swift and smooth, although I was slightly concerned about the time it took for my character to change from crouching to standing, especially when I'd just had a grenade thrown at me - moving when crouched was too slow for my liking and I had to reload the level a few times when this happened. It seems that a good strong press of the key is needed to untoggle crouch-mode!

Since I am an impatient game player, I was pleased to see that your character's walking speed is set to "run" as a default. In fact, if you want to walk around at a slower pace, you need to hold the shift key down whilst you move. Needless to say, this feature didn't get used by me at all.

Like the other Vietnam FPS game Vietcong, Men of Valor sees you placed "in the field" with a squad of men. You are not alone. Although you are very much the star of the show, it's nice to see that there is no attempt to suggest that you are some kind of one-man army, endlessly massacring your way through South-East Asia, you are part of a team, albeit a team that (in a game sense) takes its cues from you. Except in a few instances where the plot requires it, the members of your squad will generally stay where you are. They will only move forward to indicate either the general direction you are supposed to go (your "patrol route" if you like) or hang back if the game requires that you, the player, undertake a specific operation.

By way of an example, one mission sees you with the four other members of your squad advancing up a hill deep in the jungle. At all times you move together, and provide covering fire for each other, except at the end of the level when you are required to move forward and mark an enemy bunker with smoke to call in an airstrike. Your squadmates lay down covering fire for you whilst you advance, but other than this assistance, you are on your own for this portion of the level. Tricky...

Unfortunately, your squadmates can sometimes develop the annoying (and potentially fatal!) tendency to walk in front of you as you are letting rip with your machine gun. I really wish they wouldn't, the paperwork is such a pain to deal with afterwards...

But of course, you and your squadmates are not the only people strolling around the jungles - there is also the enemy to contend with, and they can be a mixed bunch. Your basic Vietcong guerrilla appears to vary from the fast and sneaky difficult-to-kill variety (hiding and crouching low in a building to pop up and snipe at you every now and then) to the insanely bold easy-to-take-down variety (charging at you, guns blazing, only to be instantly cut down by you and your squadmates). The VC I encountered were also pretty poor shots and didn't seem to behave as a proper guerrilla army should - they were always very keen to engage us face to face, in the open, rather than hiding or running to fight another day.

The members of the North Vietnamese Army are a different deal altogether. With proper equipment and tactics, they are often much harder to spot, and if they shoot at you, the chances are they will hit you. Beware!

Unlike many FPS games, searching bodies isn't just a case of walking over them and automatically picking up whatever items the person was carrying---you actually have to stop over the body and press the Space bar. A little timer pops up to demonstrate the time it's taking your character to search. It's not long, just a few seconds, but it's a factor you have to take into account. This is a neat touch that adds a little tension because more often than not you simply won't have time to search anyone because his friends are busy trying to shoot your teeth out. Even so, I liked this feature.

In the same way, “health management" isn't always just a case of walking over a Medkit and instantly becoming healthy (although don't get me wrong, there is still a lot of that going on). If you are in combat and you are shot, your health status bar dips a little (or a lot if you are subjected to the blast from a grenade). Dark red indicates permanent damage---you could be in trouble. However lighter red means you are bleeding, and you can stop this before it becomes permanent damage. You have a limited period of time to stop the bleeding by applying a bandage. The default key for this is the “F" key, and by pressing this key, you can restore any light red areas of health that you have lost. In another effort to go towards a more “realistic" situation, it works best if you stay still, so no fighting whilst you are trying to stitch yourself up. Again, this is a neat feature that I quite liked, although on the lower difficulty levels it's easier to go searching bodies for Medkits because when you find one, you are instantly in tip-top fighting condition again.

During your tour, you will observe other activities, such as the occasional patrol of helicopters flying over your head. Although the helicopters add a sense of ambience to the proceedings, for the most part they just appear to be flying over randomly with no rhyme or reason. I certainly could have done with the assistance of a gunship on more than one occasion and I sometimes got the impression that the choppers were merely being used to reinforce the location of the game---sort of “Look! It really is Vietnam! It's got Hueys and everything!"

Of course, one of the other defining things about the Vietnam War was the use of booby-traps to injure or kill unsuspecting American soldiers. This game is no exception. Unless you carefully watch where you are stepping at all times, you always run the risk of being taken out by an exploding grenade attached to a tripwire, or a spring-loaded trap of Punji sticks swinging out and impaling you or one of your friends.

Be careful out there.

When important events happen during the game, the screen goes into "widescreen" mode and a cinematic sequence plays out in front of you, you can continue to look around as your character, but you cannot otherwise move, walk or fire.

To be honest, I found the graphics to be something of a curate's egg - good in parts.

Having made sure that I had the most up to date drivers for my graphics card, AND having patched the game up to version 1.2, I was somewhat disappointed to observe a number of graphical "glitches" in some of the textures that were being displayed from time to time. Occasionally, bits of vegetation, armour plate or skin would become opaque or white in colour, which was rather distracting at times. I am hoping that future patches will correct this problem.

In addition, I found the direct sources of lighting to be crude and obvious. During a night mission, shafts of light from spotlights arrayed on a bridge were too rigidly defined for my liking, with no diffusion. It just didn't look right, and I would have expected a lot more from a game since the likes of Far Cry and Doom 3.

The water effects are quite nice to look at, but I would be lying if I said I hadn't seen better. Yes, the water looks nice and shiny and reflective, and ripples quite convincingly, but it's been done so much better in older FPS games and was a little bit of a letdown for this reviewer.

Weapon models appear to be accurate with adequate loading and firing effects. Although not in Call of Duty league, the image of bullets from my M14 thudding into a wooden shack stuck in my mind as being pretty convincing.

One very impressive effect occurs when being subjected to artillery or mortar fire. The screen not only shakes to demonstrate the concussion of the explosions around you, but your vision also becomes blurred and your movements slow down. It's an excellent representation of the terror of being caught up amongst detonating high explosive.

There's a toggle option to turn off any blood or gore effects. If you leave the blood option switched on, there's always a convincing spray of claret whenever you hit an opponent. Unlike some games though, there are no pools of blood on the floor when someone hits the floor, so it's not gratuitous in any way, and if you think it is, you can turn it off.

The 3d modelling of your squadmates and enemy soldiers is adequate and gave me no particular cause for complaint, but at the same time, they are nothing special.

Where the graphics score major points however is with the general environment. Vegetation is displayed in abundance and always looks convincing (glitches aside). During your tour of duty you will fight through dense jungle, grassy villages, plantations, paddy fields and swamps. You will even discover burned-out crash sites with charred and shattered treetrunks stretching up into the sky, dense mud swilling around your feet as you battle your way through the rain to reach your objective. It all appears totally authentic.

It's not just the vegetation either - local fauna is well represented with birds and insects flying around you all the time. During the night, Fireflies will congregate around vehicle headlamps and as you progress through any jungle mission, an occasional flight of birds will startle you as they fly out from under a tree. In yet another brilliant way of increasing the interactivity within the game, you should be very wary if this happens - it usually means that enemy soldiers are approaching your position. I soon developed the reflex action of dropping to the ground the instant I saw any birds leaving the area in a hurry - it either meant an imminent ambush or an artillery strike, either way, it wasn't good news.

For the most part, the sound in the game is a triumph. Rifles and machine guns make very satisfying noises as you loose off a few rounds, and the sound of bullets thudding into your enemies or the surrounding environment gave me no cause for complaint. I did get a little disorientated at one stage whilst I was stood next to one of my squadmates as he was firing a burst from an M60 heavy machine gun. I could see the empty shell casings flying from his weapon, but the sound that was coming from his gun, just a few feet away from my head, didn't seem to be loud enough and I had a problem working out if the sound was supposed to be him firing or not. Then again, having said this, if it had been a real-world situation, my character would have been instantly deafened, so I guess it's a trade-off between realism and playability.

Stereo effects are masterful. In the very first mission, as you stroll around your base camp, Jet fighters occasionally scream overhead - instinctively you look up, you just can't help it, they sound so loud and so close, but I only caught a glimpse of one once, it was flying over so fast. The sound of armoured vehicles and choppers whirling overhead sounded pretty real to me, so I have no complaints here.

The ambient noise in the game is terrific. If you get a chance during the fighting to just stop and listen, you can hear birds chattering in the trees, the distant sound of helicopters cruising over the jungle, frogs croaking in the rivers and creeks and insects buzzing around near you. This can be particularly alarming if you are wearing headphones, because occasionally it sounds as if one of those insects is right there flapping away next to your ear. More than once, in my state of hyper-alertness, expecting an imminent ambush, it made me jump. Actually, I might owe Uncle Sam a few cents for the cost of the rifle rounds I expended when this happened.

If you are caught in the jungle during a storm, the constant pitter-patter of raindrops on leaves is almost soothing, until thunder rumbles menacingly overhead. It's easy to get caught up in the feel of the place just by listening to what's going on around you.

I found the music to be something of a distraction, but this is a common complaint from me when I play anything, so take this with a pinch of salt. Other players might not have a problem with it. Personally, I found that it took something away from my involvement in the game, it made me aware that I was suddenly in a movie and not fighting for my life in East Asia after all, so in the end, I turned it off. I like to be totally engrossed in what I'm doing!

For many players however, one of the most important things to know concerns the in-game speech. Younger players and/or those who are easily offended should be very clear that there is a lot, and I mean a LOT of "cursing" and colloquial, even foul language used by your squadmates and others as your tour of duty progresses. I for one am not in the least bit offended by such talk, and in fact, for this reviewer, it added to the overall sense of "being" in Vietnam. Listening to my squadmates making jokes or calling enemy solders names as they gunned them down merely added to the experience for me, but a lot of people out there might be very offended. One thing that did upset me a little, was that no-one ever said "Fire in the hole!" when I threw a grenade. Having watched so many Vietnam movies, I thought this was odd...(!)

There are a number of Multiplayer modes and maps to choose from, but the Multiplayer community doesn't appear to be flourishing massively right now - it may be too early given the recent release date of Men of Valor, or this may be related to the fact that a patch has been required to correct some multiplayer issues. I understand that there are very few servers out there with MOV playing on them, and even fewer players. In addition, having visited a couple of game forums I'm led to believe that players with the UK version of the game are having additional problems to their US counterparts. I was unable to give the Multiplayer option a real spin due to the paucity of my Dial-Up connection (Broadband is needed as a bare minimum) but nevertheless, having checked out the Multiplayer maps independently, they seem to be solidly built.

The various modes for Multiplayer include the standard Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch options, plus a Recover the Documents variation on the usual "capture the flag" game where your team has to recover and hold important documents for long enough so they can be retrieved from the battlefield. There is also a Search and Destroy option whereby teams must recover pieces of mortar equipment before their opponents can do the same thing.

Furthermore, when entering a Multiplayer game, you can select what sort of character you will appear as - this determines the type of weapons available to you.

I am unaware of any serious modifications under development, but no doubt if the game picks up a large enough fanbase, this will happen at some point in the future.

This is a very easy game to get into - but not always easy to play. One particularly difficult section in the very first mission had me stumped for about an hour. The graphical glitches are annoying at times and distracting and I hope they get sorted out soon. In addition, the fact that the game only saves your progress when you reach certain points made me feel like I was playing a straight console conversion, rather than a game that was specifically designed for both platforms.

However this doesn't detract from the overall fun to be had in playing the missions through, and I would definitely give the game more pluses than minuses. There are also a number of references to various Vietnam movies throughout, and it's fun to try and spot them all.

The game comes on 4 discs - be careful if you are running low on disc space however, because although the box indicates that 3.00 GB are required to install, the amount of space the game takes up on my drive is actually 3.64 GB - that seems to be an awfully large error to make. In addition, as I stated above, there are already patches out there that correct a number of faults that are inherent in the game as it was shipped. You will also need to make sure that you have the latest drivers for your graphics card as Men of Valor uses DirectX 9.0C.