What is with our fetish over World War 2? In what was definitely one of the world's worst conflicts, countries and societies suffered, people died by the truckload, and the nastiest side of our proud species was unleashed. In short, World War 2 was a very bad thing, and is a period of time some people (especially Germany) seem to just want to sweep under the proverbial rug. So why then are we being bombarded by a sudden number of gaming titles oriented towards this crazy period of time? Why the sudden fascination with Thompsons, Ju87s, and the sight of men and equipment exploding and dying all around during a daring beach assault? I'll tell you why - because guns are cool, explosions are cool, and seeing a Tiger tank come rolling over the hill, laying down suppressing fire with its machinegun is very cool. And between Silent Storm, Call of Duty, and now Hidden & Dangerous 2, any gamer looking to get their Nazi fix won't have to look far. It's all pixels on the screen, so what's the harm?

Hidden & Dangerous 2 is one game I've been looking forward to for a long time. Its predecessor was a really cool game for its time (if buggy), with unique tactical gameplay, a large variety of missions with unique and interesting objectives, tons of different guns and equipment to play with (even if it was possible to snipe with an SMG), and, best of all, full co-op play. My full expectation for the long-awaited sequel was to live up to the original and surpass it in quality - an expectation which Hidden & Dangerous 2 manages to live up to in some aspects, and fails miserably in many others. Let's drive onwards and dig into these elements that make up the game in more detail, shall we?

The player's role in Hidden & Dangerous 2 is to oversee a group of British SAS soldiers as they infiltrate and sabotage German operations behind enemy lines during World War 2. Starting on a campaign, the player can select his squad from a pre-existing stockpile (much like the original game, and if a character "dies", he's gone forever), followed by a dialogue for selecting the equipment your squad will use for the duration of the campaign. Unlike its predecessor, Hidden & Dangerous 2 tracks campaign inventory solely on what a squad brings into battle. There's no "central stockpile" to pile items into for reserve - if it's not in a character's inventory, it's not going to be available for the duration of the campaign, period. This offers quite a change in mission structure, because you no longer have to worry about getting half way through a campaign and finding yourself screwed because you brought one too few explosives. How? Because the development team has compensated for the more limited inventory by providing more mission-critical objects to the player throughout the actual campaign. If you're surplus one enemy tank and short one Panzerfaust, you can be certain some form of explosive weapon will be lying around the mission zone, ready for use. While a practical design decision, things seem to be a little too convenient sometimes. Nevertheless, the assistance this renders in ensuring it is not possible to become hopelessly mired in a single mission due to equipment shortages is appreciated.

But let's talk about mission structure a little later. Starting a single player session reveals three primary options - Campaign, Lone Wolf, and Carnage. Campaign is self-explanatory, but the other two options allow for a little replayability by forcing the player through the standard missions as either a solo operative, or with harder objectives, respectively. There are also two other options to play any of the single player missions already beaten over again, again either on the normal difficulty or the harder "Carnage" mode (no sign of a "Lone Wolf" option for this, though it's not like there's anything preventing the player from just leaving extra team mates behind). Anyways, the game's standard campaign mode opens up with a typical "boot camp" tutorial sequence, where the player is sent through all sorts of different facilities to learn the fine arts of running, jumping, climbing, shooting, driving, stealth, and ordering team mates around, as well as the fine art of accidentally running over one's designated instructor with a Jeep, "failing" the mission, and being forced to do everything from scratch again because the Boot Camp scenario doesn't allow mid-mission saving for some obscure reason. Provided the player manages to wade his way through training without succumbing to frustration, he's then shipped off around the world to carry out a variety of campaigns.

Aside from the incredibly vague training mission (the player isn't given any real verbal instructions on where to go next - just blind guesses with a notepad and map), it wasn't until I started to actually play that things began to go downhill. Oh sure, everything looks cool enough on the surface; an open-ground tactical combat game with the occasional mix of nitty-gritty urban combat, but it is only once I began to play with these aspects extensively that I began to see their flaws. First, a little more information. The average mission begins with a pre-rendered video briefing detailing the situation and objectives with a decent level of clarity. The player is then given the opportunity to assess his squad's existing inventory and launch into the mission. Actual combat takes place in a variety of environments, be it a desert city, a wintry landscape, a thick rainforest, or even an underground train tunnel, with each mission having a large variety of objects to interact with, ranging from casual doors and turrets to vehicles and, of course, enemy soldiers. One of the neat things about Hidden & Dangerous 2 is that there are actually two distinct modes to play the game. Players can either muscle through everything first-hand by manually controlling one of their four soldiers and ordering everyone else around through a semi-convenient squad command interface accessible via the numeric keypad, or hit the space bar to bring up the tactical view, which pauses the action and allows players to control everything like a strategy game, selecting soldiers and laying down waypoints for their soldiers in the actual game world, then unpausing the game to watch their men go to work. Or they can even just use a direct combination of the two interfaces as necessary.

The problem with this otherwise neat aspect stems from several different sources. How about the bugs in the interface? While there's very extensive functionality for issuing all kinds of different orders to your team mates (both in the tactical and standard interface modes), I commonly found that getting my squad to do exactly what I wanted was very difficult. Commonly they'd complete their orders only to end up facing the wrong way, or they'd somehow "forget" their aggressive/speed/stance settings between points, changing from a defensive crouched infiltrator to a crazed charging lunatic who gets gunned down by the first sniper he comes across. Other times, the flawed pathfinding would have me issue a simple "advance" command to a soldier, only to have him turn around and "advance" in the wrong direction. Units seemed to have a particularly difficult time navigating around obstacles and getting into the perfect defensive positions I designated, and I couldn't even think about trying to get them into a small building without having to switch soldiers and just manually do it myself. AI units also had a terrible time in combat - for every crack shot they landed, an extra two clips were expended either from wild misses or useless discharges into a wall or hillside. Enemy AI seemed to be a little better, though any German I encountered never really lived long enough for me to sit down and take notes. I'll just conclude by saying that the quality of the AI in Hidden & Dangerous 2 is depressingly average, and this bogs down the rest of the game's quality, due to its heavy reliance on squad-based tactics.

But if AI were the only thing wrong with Hidden & Dangerous 2, I'd feel better about letting it get away with a decent score. Unfortunately, mission design is another one of the game's gross downfalls, and it almost gets to the point of irritation. I'm not talking about basic little annoyances like NPCs getting stuck in corners or infinitely re-spawning enemies though, I'm referring to flat-out glaring bugs in the mission scripting itself. There are at least three missions in the game where, after a good hour of effort, I had to completely restart from scratch because a scripting error resulted in some critical objective becoming impossible to complete, either due to an object failing to spawn, the game refusing to acknowledge placement of an explosive, or a critical NPC refusing to budge. If it wasn't a critical show-stopping problem, then it was a more subtle issue, like, again, incredibly vague and/or hard to follow directions, or just outright poorly designed missions that force stealth on the player and fail him the instant that he's detected. Apparently, Germans in World War 2 were all psychically connected, enabling them to all be instantly alerted the second a threat appeared.

Yes, the concept of "stealth" in this game is a joke, because silenced weapons still have the occasional chance to bring the guards running, knives are nearly useless due to the difficulty involved in sneaking up on enemies, and, even though it is possible to force enemies to "surrender" so you can steal their uniforms (the chances and circumstances involved in this happening seem to be wildly randomized), even this can often lead to a quick and fatal detection unless you spend 20 minutes swapping out your entire inventory for German equipment and don't get within 5 kilometers of an enemy soldier. Someone in the Q&A department was definitely asleep at the switch. Or maybe the person handling the reports got lazy. I don't know, but I do know that forced stealth missions almost always end with misery in an action title, and Hidden & Dangerous 2 is no different. For cripes sake, if we want to sneak around a little, sure, give us the chance, but make the game open-ended enough so that players aren't spamming the quick-load button every time Helmut the Drunk spies a tiny moving dot with his 20/20 vision. Which reminds me - the game only allows for one save/load slot. You either click "Save" or you click "Load". Anyone wanting to keep more than one saved game in the middle of a long mission will have to adopt the old Operation: Flashpoint trick of alt-tabbing out and renaming the save file. Lovely.

Hidden & Dangerous 2's singleplayer aspect isn't all terrible, but the number of bugs present in the game definitely hampers the experience. However, it should be said that the missions - when they work - have a wide variety of interesting objectives and items to interact with, and I had quite a bit of fun playing some of the less frustrating missions. There are quite a number of scripted sequences (one mission actually has you cruising through a treacherous desert canyon in either a jeep or a Flak truck while being constantly strafed by aircraft, and another involves manning the gun turret of a stolen Junkers while trying to ward off attacking Luftwaffe) and cutscenes that add a nice interest factor to the campaign, and missions can vary quite a bit in nature. One might involve assaulting an occupied town, then the next demands it be held against an enemy counter-attack the following night, for example. There's also a large variety of weapons and equipment that can be used to carry out these goals, offering everything from the lowly Thompson and MP40 to all manner of rifles (unscoped rifles actually pack a big punch and are practical now, unlike the original Hidden & Dangerous), explosives, medical kits, bazookas, and even binoculars for anyone too lazy to carry a sniper rifle around. Vehicles are definitely always a nice touch, but I have to admit the control felt a bit lacking due to the absence of mouselook functionality - bouncing around in a Jeep is a lot harder when your limited view is stuck in place facing forwards. Of course it's possible to drive and look around with full mouselook functionality if you take control of one of the passenger positions, but driving solo is quite tricky.

The input system in Hidden & Dangerous 2 is one of the few elements that actually managed to impress me to some degree. Yes, I'm serious. Some people might take a first glance at the vast number of key bindings available and ask what kind of crack I'm on, but with the incredibly large number of different controls the game offers, I was more than impressed with the solution the development team implemented as a default control layout. The system is focused primarily around the arrow keys (which threw me for a loop the first time because of my WASD preference) for movement, with the mouse for aiming. Left button shoots, right button is the general "Use" key for interacting with entities. The mousewheel is a variable speed adjuster, enabling players to affect how fast they move (yes, similar to Splinter Cell), which in turn changes how fast their endurance drains and how accurate their weaponry is while moving (and the near-irrelevant stealth factor, of course). All other basic controls are within easy reach of the movement keys - enter is the universal "reload" button, Shift and Ctrl are crouch and prone toggles, while "Home" can be used to climb over small obstacles. There's even leaning buttons within each reach to poke around corners without exposing yourself, or a button to throw grenades off-hand without having to put your weapon away. The controls in Hidden & Dangerous 2 were definitely very well done, and I applaud the development team for tackling the complex task of setting up an interface with that many controls in an easy fashion. One of the few things that can be said this game did well.