Soldiers-Heroes of WWII

There is no wonder why most wargame “grognards" would refuse to admit that any real-time-strategy (RTS) games are “wargames" since it is too difficult to simulate the complex behavior of war in real time for the designers, and more importantly too hard or plain impossible for the players to command and control. Thus, those games were termed 'war-themed' RTS games.

Soldiers, Heroes of World War II (“Soldiers" from now on) by the Codemasters Software Company is one such RTS on war themes. With a WWII background, Codemasters employed beautiful graphics to lead the players through a few linked battlefields of epic historical campaigns as the 'soldiers' - the true heroes of WWII. The real time combat system naturally restricted the game's ability to pursue historical accuracy in any sense. The designer apparently had to choose playability over reality. As a result, the strategy (if any) and tactics involved in this game were very simple or even trivial; and the depth of scenarios or campaigns was thin. These issues certainly disqualify Soldiers as a wargame; yet no one says a good game must be a wargame.

For the huge population of non-wargamers or wargamers seeking non-wargaming fun, Soldiers might still be a very delightful experience.

The number one striking point of Soldiers is the nice quasi-3D graphics. But beauty comes with a cost - the player should have up-to-date hardware to accommodate this game. I ran it on a somehow out-of-date setup consisting of a P4 1.8ghz, 768MB RAM, and a GeForce2 64MB graphics card.

It can still run and give me all the visual pleasure it has to offer, but when the battle gets a bit involved (say, like 10 units shooting each other), it gets bumpy and can be very slow. Higher standard systems can make a difference. The pictures and movies of the landscape, vehicles and people, even the decorative animals are very nice and detailed. However, I called the graphics “quasi-3D" due to the fact that the in-game graphs still lack a true “all scale" zoom-in and out ability, and you only have a very limited angle of view (basically only “top-down"). For the scope of this game, this nevertheless meets the need of the virtual combat.

Soldiers supports single and multiplayer options. The single player mode includes 4 linear campaigns featuring Soviet, British, American and German nationalities. It also has a few “bonus missions" which are basically larger maps with more units engaged - kind of “death match" type scenarios. Before taking up the roles in any of these, the player may also find it very helpful to walk through the training missions.

The training sessions are well organized, easy to follow, and quite necessary for a new player. After that, one probably feels hot enough to get some action. And there you go; you jump into a T34 tank, for example, and then a supposedly Russian accent introduction will bring you into a situation faced by the 23rd Tank Corps.

You will be given 3 difficulty levels to choose. Well, these are "classic" difficulty settings, which means a higher difficulty level does not imply 'smarter' AI for a soldier; instead, it simply means more of the same unimaginative AIs. So do not be scared by the sheer number of the enemies you are facing once you get into the real mission (or by the few units you have - think about it this way, after all, you cannot handle more than 3 units all the time anyway.). But soon, you will find that the numerical superiority of the enemy does not mean anything, since most of them would simply sit still and watch the units engaged by you being destroyed and (amusingly) salvaged by you. As a matter of fact, you can even repair (!) knocked-out enemy tanks and re-use them (right in front of their comrades!) This actually turns out to be one of the most important tactics in this game. Of course, you need to have some remaining repair kits, which usually you do. This is the most unrealistic feature of this game. But again, no one says this game is about reality.

Your units all have 'life bars'. An 88mm penetration of the turret won't knock out your tank completely, but surely it will cost you a lot of 'life'. Yet that is repairable. I think for the sake of the game model, this is not to be blamed. When one of your Tigers is facing 15 or more M4s, there got to be some way to damage and renew your Tiger; otherwise, the game would simply not be playable. The only drawback is at one point, I was wondering whether it was the soldiers who were the true heroes of WWII, or the mechanics.

Anyway, after some careful or carefree operations (depending on your taste; either like peeling off the enemies layer by layer, or like blasting away through the virtual hell of combat), you will achieve a victory (or defeat!) screen. Of course, the load feature is expected to be utilized in the latter case (provided that you used the save feature some time earlier...) If the former is the outcome, and you win the battle, you will advance into the next mission of the campaign. Each campaign contains about 5 missions, which seems about right.

The British and American campaigns involve more infantry operations, while the Soviet and German ones have more tank actions. They all have some tricky 'critical timing' episodes, which you might need to try a few times to complete.

The single player experience will probably take about 15 to 20 hours of game time, which is not too bad for such a small scale, light fun type game. Replay value is probably low for most players.

After working through the campaigns, you might want to go online. Of course, do not forget to disable your firewall settings if you run Windows XP. Yet, expecting too much excitement from multiplayer Soldiers is probably not very smart.