All of this of course comes together in the actual campaign missions, of which there are quite a few with varying and interesting objectives far beyond that of “run in and destroy X object”. Some missions demand clever use of enemy artillery to destroy strategic targets before destroying the remaining equipment and high-tailing it for the hills, while another might have you sneaking in behind German lines to actually light up a number of fires in a large field during the night so a plane can land to aid extraction of your team (and the process doesn’t just involve issuing the “use” command on a pre-set objective – you actually have to hunt down wood, oil, and a way of lighting the fire). One of my most memorable missions even involved a complex train yard, where your team is tasked with going in to steal a missile truck mounted on a railway car. First, the train engine has to be hijacked and moved into position to dock with the car, and then the train has to be successfully navigated out of the train yard, requiring that men go ahead to flip the railroad switches as appropriate. There are a lot of really cool things the developers did with the game’s mission design and scripting system, and there’s even a background story to each campaign following a specific group of men, so there’s quite a bit of content to work with, and a variety of difficulty settings can make the action even more interesting. Even though there are only a few missions for each of the four campaigns, this is balanced out by the fact that each mission takes quite a bit of time and effort to work through, so don’t expect to blow through the whole game in a day. But be advised, the difficulty variations can make for some incredibly easy gameplay one second, and a hair-pulling experience the next, so be prepared to utilize the save/load function on a regular basis. Which reminds me, an annoying bug somehow crept into the game’s release where a loaded save file will actually “forget” the control-group bindings players can set up to quickly select specific soldiers, which can cause a hell of a lot of frustration and confusion for RTS veterans.

The game engine in SHoWW2 is indeed highly sophisticated in many regards. Under the hood, there is a complex physics system running that accurately models all kinds of vehicles, ragdoll effects, and explosions, offering a level of brutal realism rarely seen in any kind of strategy title (hence my initial comparison of this game to Silent Storm). All weapons are properly set up with the appropriate penetration values for the era, so a light tank with a tiny cannon will have problems doing any kind of damage to all but the lightest of enemy vehicles, while fearsome monsters like the dreaded “Tiger” tank can usually finish off anything it encounters on the battlefield with one shot, even bypassing the strong frontal armor of enemy tanks. This gives rise to a great deal of strategic maneuvering, as trying to destroy an enemy tank almost always entails trying to sneak around behind it so the sensitive, weakly-armored engine assembly can be targeted. Treads can be damaged, wheels on trucks and cars blown off, and even turrets totally destroyed thanks to the massive attention to detail and the ability to specifically target enemy components in the direct control mode, and no two soldiers or vehicles are ever destroyed in exactly the same way. One tank could be blown literally sky-high, for example, while the other will simply shudder violently from a direct hit, stop, and suddenly burst into flames as the crew bails out in a hasty manner, running away before the fire consumes them. As for all the other important graphical hub-bub, the terrain and textures all look very well done, and the animations superb, but my big complaint is that there’s no way to truly appreciate the detail. The camera controls for each mission have an annoyingly short maximum zoom distance, preventing players from really getting in on the action by seeing the grisly details up close. Despite the game’s environment being fully 3D (you can see in the slow-panning main menu backdrops that there are even a selection of sky textures in the game), there is no way to totally re-angle the camera like one could in, say, Ground Control.

Unfortunately, the game’s massive attention to detail comes at a big price. On my XP2500+ machine with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro, I commonly have to struggle to maintain a good framerate in the game – shadows had to be tuned off completely, in fact, just to get something above a 20 FPS average. The forums are rife with complaints about performance and general game instability, and while the effects won’t be too terrible provided your system is at least somewhat beefy, don’t expect any big miracles if you’re below the 1.8Ghz range with only a medium-end video card. The game is also very memory intensive (given how everything in the environment can be blown up, shot up, burnt up, or otherwise destroyed in some fiendish manner, I’m not surprised), so maybe now would be the time to get that RAM upgrade you’ve had your eye on.

Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 offers a decent audio experience, with some thrilling music tracks that change based on the combat situation (a natural addition to any modern game) and lots of great sound effects that perfectly match the environment – listening to an MG34 emplacement open up will probably put any WW2 enthusiast in heaven. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly say the same for the voice acting, which elicited responses anywhere from a slightly amused glance to flat out confusion and curiosity at the lines being said. Hearing my American troops heartily shout out “The Germans are gonna learn how WE do it in Missouri!” or “Let’s blow their brains all over the place!” after issuing a standard move command is one thing, but listening to wounded enemy soldiers mutter “Not to vorry, in zee evening ve’ll get some Schnapps to ease zee pain” or “Now zee command vill have no choice but to give me a NEW uniform!” just sounded… odd. The choices for dialogue almost took the game away from the serious, brutal atmosphere it was trying to represent, and I think some more generic lines would’ve probably worked better. There’s still a lot of adequate dialogue flying around to make leaving the voices turned on worthwhile, but overall it could have definitely been a lot better. There are also a few small bugs I ran into with the sound engine where I’d get strange static in place of some ambient sound effects (like background gun / mortar fire), but this was incredibly rare and was easy enough to ignore.

Multiplayer is both SHoWW2’s strongest asset (or, at least, it should’ve been) and, at the same time, its weakest link. Initially, the game was planned to ship with a competitive multiplayer mode for up to sixteen players on top of its four-player co-op mode, but this ended up being cut at the last minute, leaving just the co-op gameplay. The competitive mode is expected to be released in a patch not too far off (along with a huge number of planned fixes and tweaks the game needs somewhat badly), but the co-op mode was what I was truly interested in trying out, so at the first opportunity I hooked up with a LAN buddy to give it a shot. Co-op play basically lets you play any of the singleplayer missions in the game with up to three other players, who gain control of specific units in the mission. Troops can be traded back and forth between players during gameplay as necessary until everyone is satisfied with their arrangement, and some of the missions have special tweaks for co-op mode to ensure all players have at least one soldier to work with (a couple of the singleplayer missions start off only placing one or two soldiers under the player’s control, hence the adjustment). Once everyone’s up and going, the game can basically be approached just like in singleplayer, scripted sequences and all, except now there are real human players to work together with to win, making for some tremendously addictive gameplay. Or at least it would, if everything actually worked properly. Problems such as inexplicable slowdown and framerate loss on client machines (especially when a heavy physics calculation needs to be done) or outright crashes and “Out of Sync” errors constantly plague multiplayer, and because there is no save functionality available, this can lead to a lot of frustration. Suggestions and workarounds include playing with the server settings, ensuring no mods are loaded and active on any of the connecting players, and just hooking up over a LAN environment to ensure the most reliable connection, but even these precautions have no real guarantee whatsoever of working. The best bet is to wait for the next patch.

Winding down, I’m definitely of the opinion that Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 is a refreshing look on an otherwise slightly stale RTS industry. With the direct control system, insane level of detail and physics modeling, exciting and interesting missions, modding support, and incredibly fun gameplay, the game is hardly stale and makes it easy to recommend to players who are sick of playing Command & Conquer clones. But several outstanding issues that really need fixing, combined with some general interface clunkiness and gameplay that is bound to daze and confuse new players until they go through the tutorial missions a couple of times bring the game’s score down some notches. There are a lot of problems with SHoWW2 that just scream “premature release”, makes me think Codemasters may have just been in a rush to get the game out the door before the big-time panic for Doom 3 hit. That said, the game is still very much worth picking up, just for the sheer pleasure of chucking an anti-tank grenade at an oncoming Panzer and taking out half a village in the resulting explosion, chaos, and rampaging fire. ”And now, let’s go stick our head in the meat grinder!”