Game: Men of War: Red Tide
Platform: PC
Publisher: 1C Company
Developer: Best Way
ESRB: Teen
Genre: Action / Strategy Hybrid
Players: 1-4 (post-modding)
What's Hot: It's the expansion pack to one of the best co-operative multiplayer games ever; dynamic, open-ended tactical gameplay that made the original so much fun, but with better voice acting and a bunch of new missions
What's Not: To actually get to this fun, you have to first fix the game by launching the standalone expansion pack as a 'mod' to the original game and hacking up the mission files. Unless you don't have any friends and don't care about co-op play of course
Review by: Dave VanDyk
I'm going to be perfectly blunt: I absolutely love Men of War—particularly its co-op gameplay feature. What was initially a punishing, slightly tedious (if pretty) game of micro-management suddenly turned into an utterly addictive work of art once I teamed up with my friends to delve into the game's various missions in co-op mode. This mode was so much fun that Men of War ranked as our #5 PC game of 2009.
Suddenly we were tackling each challenging level by divvying up available supplies and vehicles, arguing over things like who got to drive the Kübelwagen, and laughing as someone used all of our team's dynamite supply to set off the WW2 equivalent of a small nuclear explosion, just so they could dislodge a wrecked tank off of a teammate's corpse and revive him.
When you're spending fun hours doing things like this, it suddenly gets much easier to overlook the game's smaller problems. Let's just say that there's a damn good reason why Men of War (along with its predecessors, Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 and Faces of War) has single-handedly had more play time than any other co-op supporting title in our LAN library.
So naturally, you can imagine my local group of LAN friends were overjoyed when we found out an expansion was on the way. The standalone release of Red Tide promises an all-new Russian-oriented campaign with a storyline written by Alexander Zorich (the collective pen name of a pair of ultra-famous Russian writers), a set of new artillery, assault, and naval vehicles to use, and the usual assortment of new weapons. Red Tide does deliver on all of these points, and even takes advantage of some decent voice talent to deliver the narration and acting with a much higher level of quality than its predecessor - the campaign in particular offers a large number of missions, which are divvied up between front-line assaults, defense missions, and the ever-loved special ops missions, which start you off with a minimum amount of troops and often end with you disabling an enemy Tiger, repairing it, and using it to wreak havoc behind enemy lines (or something).
