by: Robert Zacny

For the people who love it, there seems to be no such thing as too much Men of War. When you finish the campaign, you can play through it again with friends, and then do it again with different friends. It will probably be a different experience each time. Now, with Men of War: Assault Squad, DigitalMindSoft plan on fully embracing the game's co-op possibilities.

In addition to the familiar Eastern Front stomping grounds, Assault Squad also opens up arenas in France and the Pacific, along with the possibility of playing as the British Commonwealth, the United States, and the Japanese.

The heart of the game is a co-op skirmish mode against the AI across sprawling control-point maps. The demo I played at a recent 1C press event was a control-point battle between the CPU-controlled Germans and the Americans on a long, narrow map that tossed several different tactical situations at each side. Even though I only fought a third of the way toward the German side of the map, I ended up playing through a bitter fight to seize control of a dam, a tank battle in the shallows of a swamp, a desperate base defense, a bridge capture, a forced crossing at a shallow stream, and a brawl in a farmyard.

As the bodies piled up in roads and meadows, I was keeping a nervous eye on my requisition points and waiting to accumulate enough of them to buy something with more staying power. More often than not, my reinforcement appeared on the map at my home base just in time to fend off a wave of Germans.

Since I was playing by myself, I found it nearly impossible to hang onto all my gains. I could only focus on one or two things at a time, while the AI flowed against every one of my positions. Since your troops really cannot accomplish very much without your direct supervision, it's almost impossible to be attacking in multiple places at once. When I tried to run multiple fights, I only managed to lose all of them. Perhaps the game will receive some tuning for solo-play, but right now it pretty much demands that you have a wingman.

In the end, I just focused on a couple units and sent them blasting through enemy strong points and into the backfield. In my case, I used a mechanized infantry squad aboard a halftrack along with a light tank, and just went around the map picking fights. My units would roll right up to German positions at high speed, the infantry would pile out while shielded by the armor, and then overrun the Germans. We were kind of like the Scooby Gang, and the halftrack was our Mystery Machine.