Sneaking into a base in Norway.
Third person mode is very handy for this.

Described succinctly the game is a tactical shooter where you lead a team of four SAS trained soldiers into enemy territory where you are asked to perform sabotage, infiltration, informant extraction, defense or just plain reconoiter and destroy the enemy where you see him. This happens in a range of environments from Norway snow and North African desert to battleships and European urban environments. It being set in WWII the enemy of choice is primarily German soldiers although their allies feature as well as a few ostensible allies of your own. Like it's predecessor the odds are usually heavily stacked against you with forty plus enemies equipped with everything from pistols to heavy machine guns to planes and that bane of infantry - tanks. Care has to be taken to choose engagements in such a way that you have the advantage and a healthy selection of tools is provided to do just that.

Standing on the recently captured U-boat we
admire the view to the German meterology base.
This is a particularly pretty level.

Starting with silent weapons like knives, silenced sten guns through to the Delisle rifle (a subsonic rifle that has limited range but is very quiet as a result) you can choose to quietly pick off the enemy as you find them. Alternatively you can pack heavy firepower including Bren guns, Enfield rifles, M1 Garands, not so silenced sten guns, Thompson submachines and the like so that you can concentrate a withering amount of firepower onto your targets. Care has to be taken to ensure that your flanks are covered so you can even lay anti-personel or anti-vehicle landmines on your flanks. Then all you need is to make enough ruckus to lure the enemy into your prepared kill zone. Or you can choose to sneak in steathily and achieve your objectives with as little fuss as possible. The enemy merely awakens the next day to find those top secret plans missing and a little C4 surprise awaiting them.

Rounding up the squad to raid that base.

Not all missions let you pick quite such a wide variety of fighting styles with a few forcing you to eliminate all enemy in a region or some requiring stealth to a large degree. Interestingly with the stealth sections you can often aid yourself by stealing an enemy uniform, however care has to be taken to only pack enemy equipment and dress (although you can hide useful allied gear inside your backpack) or else they will recognise you to be an intruder. The nifty part is that only an enemy that has surrendered is useful for stealing a uniform so you have to intimidate one into giving you one. It isn't good enough to shoot or knife an enemy then nick their uniform - the blood stains and holes will give the game away. So part of the AI response is an option to surrender, or just plain run for the hills. It makes a nice change after having massacred most of an enemy patrol to see members of it very sensibly try and run for it.

Leaving the now ruined airfield in North Africa.
The tank, seen mid right, was a particular bother
as there is very little cover to flank the thing.

In fact overall the AI for both friendly and enemy units is quite good. Guards will notice their friend being bumped off and will react, units find cover from fire, go for help and as already mentioned run away if the fighting gets too nasty. The delay the game has suffered from in reaching New Zealand has worked to our advantage with the 1.02 patch being available which has, judging from comments on various forums, cured a lot of the AI woes where they used to get stuck on scenery and the like. Friendly AI is equally impressive for the most part. They will generally do what they are ordered to do and even choose appropriate weapons for the task - order them to silently kill someone and they will switch to a silenced weapon if they have one. Generally you don't have to babysit your troops, indeed a lot of the time they are actually better at spotting and dealing to the enemy than you are. Perhaps most remarkable of all is that they know not to shoot through friendly units and will complain vociferously if you are blocking their shot. It makes a wonderful change to not be shot in the back by 'friendly' fire. (Murphy's Laws of Combat notwithstanding.)

Multiplayer occupation mode sneaking up a street.
You quickly learn to cover each other or die here.

The depth of AI and simulation going on in the game is quite impressive, it does however demand a quite complicated interface system too. There are three fully distinct methods of playing the game that can be mixed and matched as required. A third person view which allows a good peripheral vision so is extremely handy for stealth missions but can be a bit problematic when it comes time to shoot. Second a fully first person mode so that the game becomes quite immersive and shooting is a lot simpler. Finally a tactical mode where you get an overview of the battlefield and, while time is paused, can issue orders to each trooper including waypoints, tasks to do, movement speed and style (crawling, crouching etc...) so that you can finely describe your ballet of violence in detail. Not only can you issue orders in the tactical mode but in both first and third person views you have a slightly abbreviated interface where you can issue commands directly to each trooper within earshot. During our playtesting of the game we spent most of our time in first person mode issuing orders directly. The buzz of feeling like a commander in battle, issuing orders and watching them be carried out was a thrill quite unlike many other games.

Especially when each trooper not only has their own fully developed backstory but makes entries in the company diary between missions and has their own unique skill set. You become quite attached to your special hand picked squad of troopers (whom you can rename too, if you have a hankering to recreate any particular squads of people) that you can't help but try and choose carefully on where you place them and how you attack an objective. Indeed some missions we retried not because we failed to achieve the objectives but purely because it cost us a squadmate doing it and that was simply unacceptible. It is a sign of a really good game when you become wrapped up in it enough to care about these fictional entities.

Incoming stuka attack. The mission can
get quite trying as you dodge the plane's fire.

Rounding out this package is a grand collection of both single and multi-player modes. In single player you can, after unlocking a mission, replay it in 'Lone Wolf' mode where you take one soldier through the mission and try and complete it. A further spice to the mix is that both team and lone wolf single player modes can be played in 'Carnage' mode where an extra objective is added - eliminate all enemy in the target area. Lone Wolf Carnage mode is a decided challenge even on the easier difficulties. Multi-player offers ostensibly three modes of play. Old fashioned deathmatch, if it moves fix that problem. Objective mode, think counter strike in WWII garb, where you have a collection of objectives to acheive with the other team defending those objectives. You have only one life per round and stay dead till the next round so what often happens is that the defensive team goes decidedly offensive and simply tries to eliminate the attacking team at which point they win. Effectively this mode collapses back to deathmatch. The final multi-player mode is occupation mode where flags are fought over and the team that can claim all the flags wins the round. With respawns occuring every thirty seconds this results in a game where the battle tends to ebb and flow a bit. It gets to it's most intense when one team is down to controlling one or two flags and the amount of fire being tossed around gets quite astounding. These aren't modes that are going to tear people away from other games but they are a nice addition rounding out the long term value.

There are a few drawbacks to all this though. For starters the keyboard interface, due to supporting so many play styles, is quite complicated and is layed out around the cursor keys. Something that forces so unweildy finger contortions as you try to hit all the required keys. A little key redefinition cures that but the keyboard is very heavily used so that will take some time to do. We can't help but feel there is a little further room available for streamlining the interface here. Next the gaming environments are sufficently large that even on single missions the amount of texture data required must have been huge. Some corners have been cut to reduce the amount of work such that you can get some incongruities like pin sharp people standing on decidedly blurry ground. It is a little vexing but not really a major issue and given the games already huge size we can live with it - the gameplay more than compensates. The AI occasionally does stupid things, it isn't so bad with the enemies but when the friendly AI decides to blow your stealthy approach by whipping out a bren gun and cutting loose it can be decidedly irritating to say the least. Fortunately this is fairly rare. We also encountered a very bizarre bug which saw the game fail to load a mission in such a way that it became impossible to complete it. Quiting the game, reloading everything and trying again cured the problem but you have to be aware that it is going on to know that you need to do that. You can end up spending a significant amount of time backtracking through a mission desperately looking for a way to finish it. This is the most serious flaw we discovered with the game.

But the biggest drawback, and perhaps the most shameful in some ways, is the lack of co-operative mode. The game is crying out for allowing four friends to play through the singleplayer campaign and the ability to have fully intelligent allies giving you a hand would have pushed this game pretty much into the perfect category. There is talk of this coming via either a future patch or an expansion pack but in our opinion the other multi-player modes could have gone happily by the wayside and the effort spent on them put into providing co-op mode. Hopefully Illusion Softworks will indeed release it via a downloadable patch.

Welcome to the forests of Burma. This is a multi-player
map and can get quite intense with plenty of ambush cover.