Some time ago, I came across an interesting little title being put out by Codemasters. That title was an innocent looking game called Soldiers: Heroes of WW2. Initially I rolled my eyes and overlooked it, as we’ve all seen the World War 2 theme beaten into the ground before, but for some reason I found myself intrigued upon the demo’s release, and decided to download and play it. A few weeks later I ended up running out to buy the game as soon as it came out, a decision I in no way regretted in the slightest. What made Soldiers an interesting title was its unique approach on the RTS stratagem; While the basics of controlling infantry and accomplishing your objectives were there as expected, the presentation was astonishingly well done. The game offered a cool “direct-control” mode where you could use the mouse and keyboard to control ‘any’ man or vehicle in the game, and the game also had detailed inventory and resource management – a common trick was to load up a truck with a repair kit and fuel tanks, then drive it over to a ruined tank and use these tools to get it up and running again and use it to claim victory in a mission. Combine all of this with a somewhat open-ended approach to mission scripting and some fantastic co-op play and I easily found this to be one of my favorite games of all time.

Now, some time later, it looks like the tides have shifted, and the development team has now moved on to Ubisoft. This team is now hard at work developing the next iteration of the game, Faces of War, a project which also sadly has slipped somewhat under the radar, and it’s my hope that this article can help draw a bit more attention to this game series. As a follow-up to Soldiers, Faces of War utilizes the same basic graphical style and gameplay approach, but also looks to add a tremendous level of refinement – a comparison I found pretty accurate would be to see Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 as a kind of exaggerated tech demo, with Faces of War being presented as the final product – the “real meat”, if you will. While checking out the game, it became immediately evident that there are a terrific number of differences between Faces of War and Soldiers to jack up the game’s production values and refinement significantly, especially in the graphical presentation and user interface. To begin with, veteran players of the original can expect a bit of a different approach to how the gameplay is handled. More information is now provided across the bottom of the screen on the universal taskbar, which now shows exactly how much ammunition the selected soldier (or group of soldiers) have in reserve, such as machine gun and sniper rounds, making it much easier to track this information without having to dig through a soldier’s inventory, and this ties into adjustments on how the combat is paced.

While the original Soldiers was focused on more of a commando-styled approach to doing as much damage as possible with a very small team, Faces of War appears to encourage larger-scale team combat. By default, the teams I had a chance to play with were actually arranged into ‘Squads’ automatically – issuing orders to the squad leader caused the rest of the soldiers in the group to follow suit automatically, seeking cover or going prone as needed to avoid enemy fire without me needing to manually divert them or go into the ‘direct control’ mode. In addition, there are now several interface buttons to order specific actions from your team, like a sniper attack, grenade throw, or suppressive fire, and the appropriate team member will then independently move out of position to carry out the maneuver. This is a great improvement over the previous game, where insane amounts of micro-management were needed to avoid having your men tripping over their own feet (though it raises the question on if any control issues may arise – one advantage to having smaller teams was that it was much easier to manage these groups in detail). And thankfully, the original game’s ability to hop in just about any manned object in the game, be it a gun turret or a ruined Panzer tank is still there – as are those sweet (if questionably unrealistic, but who cares?) repair kits that can let you turn a battered carcass into a fully functional behemoth of death once again.

Curiously, the game also now seems a little less reliant on the context-reactive interface that powered it’s predecessor – while the game cursor will intelligently provide the most appropriate option depending on what you have it cover (such as picking up a weapon, manning a vehicle, attacking a target, etc), there are now many more interesting options arrayed at the lower right of the screen, including buttons to ‘attach’ and ‘detach’ (which apparently means AT guns can be towed in real time if you have an appropriate vehicle handy – sweet!), specific buttons for ‘igniting’ an object or planting a mine, and other assorted options. Whether these new options will actually have a practical use in the final game however is something that remains to be seen.

The graphical upgrades inherent in Faces of War are also very easy to spot. Tracer rounds from gunfire look better than ever, and will now realistically ricochet off armored targets – the same goes for cannon rounds too. Several times I went to go fore at a tank’s strong point and ended up watching as the shell smashed into a building several blocks away, sending Germans scattering in panic. While I was a bit disappointed in how explosions don’t seem to be as ridiculously over the top as they were in Soldiers, the game still puts forth a very convincing display any time a vehicle or large object is destroyed. This is further augmented by the game’s fantastic physics engine, where just about anything and anything in the game world can be manipulated or blown apart in a convincing (and often hilarious) manner – I’m really looking forward to seeing what kind of environments we’ll have the chance to interact with in the final rendition of the game.

As a final boon, Faces of War is also promising the same multiplayer function offered in the original. While Soldiers didn’t actually receive its competitive multiplayer facelift until several patches later, Faces of War is promising a wide variety of cool gameplay modes out of the box to entice players, including modes like “Escort”, “Chicken Hunt”, “Stalker”, and other objective-based modes that look to promote a heavy focus on teamwork. Of course the game is also promising the full co-op functionality that made its predecessor a LAN party favorite, and will most likely end up being one of the key selling points to the game for me upon its release, so I’m definitely hoping it turns out well.

Faces of War is slated for release within the next month, and I’m expecting it will face stiff opposition from Relic’s opposing Company of Heroes. Frankly I fully intend to pick up both, but this is definitely looking to be an interesting year for those of us not quite sick of the World War 2 theme just yet. Expect to see a final review on this possible-underdog in the very near future.