Faces of War

"In the Shadows: A Faces of War review"

Graphics: The graphics in FoW are great. Explosions look nice, tracer fire riccohets believably, soldiers and vehicles are wonderfully detailed, and environments are richly, if not even overly, constructed and realistic. But there is one major issue: The camera. In FoW, you won't just be fighting Soviets, Allies or Germans, at any given time, you'll also be fighting the camera. You'll be constantly moving the camera to readjust, which is ok from time to time, but annoying after 2 missions straight. 8/10

Sound: FoW's sound is like an aural Jekyll & Hyde. When it comes to sound effects, it's fantastics: The explosions sound great and every weapon has it's own firing and reloading sound. The issues come up when your soldiers speak. For some reason, everyone but the Americans has a bizarre pseudo accent that combines Dutch with Czechoslovarussian or something. It's a minor gripe, but it does detract from the overall enjoyability of the game somewhat, particularly after a few missions. 7/10

Gameplay: As far as squad based RTS's go, FoW is pretty much as good as it gets. There isn't any resource management or reinforcement purchases to worry about, so you can focus on making sure you're little guys do all the killing they're supposed to. Problems abound with the AI, for example, as you'll be constantly double, triple, and quadruple clicking your sqauddies to get to cover while one of them simply stands in the middle of the road shooting at a King Tiger Panzer tank. Those moments sadly arise several times a mission, and if it weren't for your squad members being blessed with nine lives (literally, just see how many times they get back up after being hit in the head with a panzerfaust/bazooka blast), you'd never finish a mission. FoW does reintroduce an interesting option, like it did in the prequel Soldiers: Heroes of WW2, which is the ability to take control of one squad member like a third person shooter. If FoW was a little more refined here, it would have made it a great success; just imagine the potential combo of Gears of War type action with WW2. But unfortunately for us and the financial office at UbiSoft, FoW's third person experiment is generally too unweildly and unintuitive to really make that much of a positive difference. You can't crouch, throw grenades, heal or call the rest of your squad - only run and shoot. On the other hand, the third person option does give you the chance to do some truly heroic stuff, like running your machine gunner around the flanks of an enemy position, throwing an AT grenade at an entrenched position, and then dodging bullets running back to your lines. Those moments are great, and it's a real shame the developers didn't give us the chance to enjoy them more. 6/10

Overall: If you want a different feel to the standard WW2 RTS, Faces of War is a good, safe bet, if you get it patched that is. 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/07