There are games, that the moment you hear about them, from the first time, you just know they are going to be good games, somehow you can hear people talking about them with an added layer of respect. Most of the names of games, at least the ones who succeeded here in Israel, you can pronounce as a single word. Take Red Alert for example, (or redalert as it goes), or even Counter Strike – which goes by the abbreviation CS.

To make a long story short, judging by the game’s name (which is a tongue twister to anyone who doesn’t speak English natively) I wasn’t expecting greatness. How should I call it? Face? FW maybe? Even in the game’s intro, there’s wasn’t anything compelling (maybe because I was missing a video clip to impress me), and as much as the overall design seems thought out, it didn’t really entice me to play, and I ended up prejudging it as just another unexciting game. Actually, the only thing that made me play the game was my professional duty as a reviewer - after all I couldn’t just throw some screenshots. Well, was it worth it? Read on and find out.

The Story

Overall, the game follows the fights between Germans, Russians and the Alliance during WW2, and that story should be familiar enough, so I’m not going to tell it from the top. Well, to anyone who skipped school that day, and got stuck in front of the computer, here’s a recap: everybody fought against everybody, and a lot of people died. Some died in a foolishly but courageously, and some just died foolishly – it wasn’t the best war to say the least. Now, my role as the history teacher is done.

System Requirements

At this time, no system requirements have been published yet, but I can say I played on an AMD 3500, with 512 Mb of RAM and an ATI X1600, I the game ran smoothly with no stutters or lags. The game’s loading times were relatively long, probably due to the small amount of system RAM.

Graphics

One can choose the refresh rate, the color depth, as well as more advanced features like Anti-aliasing, Vertical sync, and texture quality. Personally, I like the game’s graphics, which managed to impress me compared to older strategy games. I’m not talking only about the overall graphic quality of the game, but also about the meticulousness of the designers when working on the little details, which make all the difference. Also, the spatial proportions are spot on, from the sizes of the weapons, to the building, the tanks, the troupes – believe me, it’s not an easy thing to achieve, but on the  hand it makes it hard to interact with small items, like pick up hand grenades from the ground.

Sound

I was pleasantly surprised by the sound of the game, and I’m not only saying that because of the myriad of options (I was able to set sampling rate, and different volumes for effects, speech, and environment). I really enjoyed the background music, the sound quality, and the precision with which every bullet fired is heard.

The game and its controls

Since all I received is a preview copy, I feel I cannot give a final opinion. We have to take into account the fact that a lot can still change, although in my experience all the changes should include mostly debugging (and from what I saw there still is a lot to debug).

The game is a strategy game, much like Army Man, where you play an army leader which can command any number of soldiers, and give each soldier\group\groups battle-time instruction using mouse and keyboard. Face of War has a very bothersome training stage, but still, quite crucial to your success. There’s no way around it: if you want to come out victorious, you need to put it the time and effort. Once you’re done with the training, you can play against the computer, in escalating difficulty levels, or against other people on local or internet servers. A few days ago, I actually thought about the fact that games that don’t have multiplayer support are great candidates for cracking (excluding the Steam-powered games) so I was pretty happy about the option. So I tried playing online, but didn’t find any users to play with, maybe because the game isn’t out yet.

Well, my only option then was to play the single-player campaign, choosing the Russian, Germans or Allied Forces. The German option seems unnecessary to me, after all everyone knows the ended up loosing, and that’s not the only reason I wouldn’t include them into the game a playable option. Take ET for example, there too was a need to portray the German, but hey chose to call the “axis”, which could be also Italy and Japan.

After concluding the training and moving on to real battles, I though I would conquer the world in half an hour, but the shock I got quickly knocked the wind out of me, and I almost ended up giving the game a bad score and to never see it again. It took me about half a day to get over the sting of losses I suffered with my incompetent soldiers that cannot seem to be able to follow any order properly. To win this game I had to play like the people who won in WW2, or in other words, letting the troupes do whatever they want, as long as I have MY soldier, with which I personally fought tanks and Nazi battalions. One efficient fighter can inflict much more damage then a whole squad of inept soldiers.

The controls during the game aren’t too difficult, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call the comfortable: I certainly didn’t manage every option, and there were a few things that really irritated me and made me waste a lot of time on understanding what the basic key-bindings were. But again, I don’t conceder the controls too hard to master, and I assume the more you play the more you get used to them, making less mistaking and learning more keyboard controls.

If you want to control your units during the game, that’s an altogether different story. These useless soldiers know exactly what to do in order to piss you off: when you want them to lie down one stands up, when you want them to follow you, they all stand in place, and when you want them to stand down, they all decide to improve their position and end up dead. What a naïve bunch of soldiers.

This game is quite realistic, and it has a lot of precise details, but there is one giant oversight: artillery fire, and even tanks, doesn't do nearly enough damage to your men, merely moving them just a bit. I had a blast (no pun intended) finding that out: I stood in front of three tanks, taking four hits straight, and even a few more during retreat, loosing less then half of my character’s health. The funniest thing is that they thought about making the blast blowing the soldier’s firearm out of his hands, but they didn’t think about making his hands fly off as well.

From the moment I switched to controlling only one soldier the game got to be a lot more fun, and without noticing it I played the game till the small our of the night, while fighting mindless fighters who seem to be waiting for me in their bunkers, and tanks which are backed up by heavy artillery.

The bots: as the game got tougher, the bots took the time to make my life a lot harder: the manned firing posts well and also manned tanks and stationary machineguns left behind by injured foes. The bots also knew when to hide out, or run away (although it didn’t really help them all that much). Some of the bots also seem to know when to hunt down wounded or retreating soldiers. After all, bots will be bots, and there’s nothing like playing online against n00bs and making fun of them.

Conclusion

Face of War suffered from a very first impression. It doesn’t have a very catchy name, and its interface isn’t aggressive enough. When I showed the game’s opening to one other reviewer he nearly fell asleep on my desk. The game was about to score pretty badly, and what saved it was the multiplayer option, but most importantly, the options to play solo without the annoying team members.

After playing with it for as long as needed, I’m happy to have taken the time to review the game properly. I found many appealing qualities: the effort put into the game does shine though, and its addictive nature did succeed in sucking me into it for hours. This syndrome is very well known to me from games like the Warcraft or Red Alert, but in this case I didn’t have to worry about the city, or my budget, and as a player you free from any tasks which don’t involve dead opponents (like actually building the city or any kind of unit).

Here in Israel I’m not sure the game will be successful, and it’s a shame. The game has a few properties that make it difficult to market, although it has potential - even greater then some of the games mentioned above.  Still, you have to remember the version I played isn’t a final one, and changes might occur before the game is released (which I hope might include the annoying team members). That is the reason I decided not to score the game in each category, but to give more of an overall score, which reflects the score the game might receive would it come out tomorrow.

Final Score (for the preview version):8

This score isn’t an average score based on all parameters, but more of an overall score.