![]() The former involves capturing flags and holding your ground, often fighting tooth and nail to maintain control of military checkpoints and terrain features. ![]() After all, the modes you can play, Combined Arms and Annihilation, are fun. And when the bugs are fixed, I probably will. I want to like this game it’s right up my alley, genre-wise. You may be able to guess what happened based on nothing but my tone. My computer’s no spring chicken, so I borrowed my brother’s gaming laptop to see if the results would be different. But even still, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt. And those crashes count as losses, by the way, so you can’t ever have a saved win in the game’s current state. With the campaign, however, my game crashed after every single battle, win or lose. I dealt with a few crashes during loading screens throughout my playtime, and those were annoying. Sounds interesting, right? An opportunity to min-max an army, then take the fight to the enemy with randomized maps and persistent progress? I’m in. If you go to the Steam store page for Men of War: Assault Squad 2 – Cold War, you’ll see “dynamic campaign generation” being mentioned a few times. Keywords being “might have.” System Failure The game lurking underneath the ill-conceived introduction (or lack thereof) might have redeemed Cold War. Or you might precisely adjust the angle and positioning of two vehicles so that your mounted machine guns have overlapping arcs of fire, creating a kill zone in front of your static defenses. You might seize control of an anti-tank soldier, carefully lining up a shot and knocking out enemy armor at a critical junction. When playing as an individual soldier or vehicle, a hands-on approach to timing and aiming can turn the tide of battle. On the micro-level, Direct Control changes the way you play the game. It behooves you to maximize the efficiency of your war machine, using helicopters, trucks, and armored personnel carriers to ferry people from your staging area to hotspots on the front. On the macro-level, you’ve got to deploy the right assets, at the right time, at the right location. Men cry out in English or Russian, walls and fences crumble under inexorable tank treads, and bullets snap and crack as they strike concrete. Another way developer Digitalmindsoft breathes life into battles is with their sound design. There’s a visceral satisfaction in sending a payload of high-explosive missiles to a position, watching as men, vehicles, and buildings are blasted apart in the firestorm. Baptism by FireĪnd there is good stuff - lots of it. Not everyone has time to obsess over details, and a proper introduction to the game would help people get straight to the good stuff. But disregarding the experience of the rest of us by omitting a tutorial is an oversight. I understand that there are plenty of analytical people who would be perfectly happy reading through every tip (oh, I did it too, I just wasn’t happy about it) and meticulously comparing armor penetration to hull thickness, making an effort to understand the capabilities of each unit. The first few hours are an arduous slog, and the tips section offers no help in understanding faction differences and playstyles or the utility of units like flamers. The grand result is a profoundly, needlessly frustrating introduction to Cold War. I didn’t break down after my first hour with the Cold War, but that hour was the absolute worst first impression of any game I’ve played. Generals of that conflict famously suffered from immense stress and pressure to deal with an unprecedented situation, and some broke down as a result. But let’s not forget, the Great War was not fun. ![]() One might think that such a feeling is a good thing for a strategy game to evoke. I was reminded of these battlefield experiments when I first started playing Men of War: Assault Squad 2 – Cold War.Ī seasoned Total War veteran cast into a strange theatre, I felt like an old cavalry commander sending countless men and horses into the meatgrinder. Generals were forced to experiment on the battlefield, learning in real-time which tactics would defeat static defenses like barbed wire, trenches, and machine guns (tanks and combined arms warfare) and which ones had become obsolete (cavalry). World War I marked the bloody, painful transition from heavily romanticized 19th Century-style battles to the brutally efficient, modern warfare of the 20th Century.
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