Men of War
Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 3:50 pm
So a guy on youtube gifted me this game a while ago and I told him I would LP it. I didn't know what the fuck I was getting myself into but after a day of on-off playing I'll tell you this.
It's made by Russians. And it shows.
This is a WW2 RTS. And by RTS I mean RTT because there's no resource collection or base building. Much like Company of Heroes, the game says it's an RTS but it isn't. But, unlike Company of Heroes, this game is made by Russians.
The first thing that will strike you across the face with a brick is the voice acting. Starcraft 2's voice acting is bad. World of Wacraft's voice acting is bad. But until now, the truest champion of ridiculously bad voice acting I've revered was Earth 2160. MoW has a very strong, competitive chance of taking the title away from E2160 as having the worst voice acting I've ever heard. Yes, even worse than the voice acting of Hive Workshop wc3 campaigns!
Considering that the game is made by Russians, and the soviet campaign involves Russian, you'd expect them to sound... Russian! But, they don't. They sound distinctly Amerikan. Between the forced slurring and scarcely detectable accent and the sheer lack of giving a fuck, I can barely believe the dialogue is even voiced by a human and not some elaborate text-to-speech solution from Nigeria.
Having no idea what the fuck I was getting myself into, I started the campaign on Hard and I'm dead-set on finishing it on Hard. The guy who gifted me it has just warned me that there is several missions coming up that will be truly rage-worthy. More rage worthy than what I've just gone through? I can't wait.
You start off the game with absolutely no introduction to the controls at all. Like all modern games, the controls it tells you aren't matched with any rebindings you've made. In a bid to make the game somewhat sensible, I rebound a lot of the keys for abilities and skills that were all previously bound to various F keys. In doing so I just served to confuse the fuck out of myself. You see, the game has an "RTS" control mode and a "third-person" control mode. Both are equally irritating to use. But, this in a moment.
What struck me immediately upon starting the game was not only how horrible it looked but how badly it performed. I was baffled by the shitty performance, where even sc2 performed better under poor circumstances like W&M. As it turns out, this is due to the fog of war. Fog of war defaults to off - I had turned it onto "realistic", aka barely visible, and reverted to Simple. Upon discovering that the fog of war is entirely cosmetic and actually doesn't effect gameplay or unit AI at all, I caved in and turned it back off. +20fps. While recording. In 1920x1200. HOW THE FUCK?!
Out of these five fine young men, only two will be making it past this point in the same dimension.
Confusion turned to absurdity in a heartbeat. You start near a truck. You can put your dudes in the truck. I did just this. I couldn't get some of my dudes out of the truck. I was so fucking confused, because the game introduces you to two generic Russian characters and gives you like 3-4 guys when you start. Unable to extract my additional men (or possibly my two "heroes", I'll never know), I continued on. As it turned out, when the game transitioned between cinematics and parts of the zone, those guys remained permanently stuck inside that truck. The truck, unable to move or do anything, existed only in a fantastical limbo between reality and memories, trapping two of my dudes in it. As it turns out, this made an exceptionally hard mission 42x more retarded.
You come across a bunch more allied dudes who, for but a moment, stand there shooting at nothing. Almost immediately you are given a tank and told to lone-gun an entire fucking German battalion. I did just that - after almost a dozen restarts. As it turns out, enemy infantry will never attack you while you're in a tank. Instead, they'll try to use you for cover. While you're standing still, or while you're moving. The exception to this is if they have a grenade. As I quickly discovered, this particular tank is totally immune to most projectiles in the games. Except grenades. A single grenade will generally dislocate a track or kill you entirely. Luckily for you, your two Russian comrades can somehow sew a fucking tank track back together with their handy dandy wrench and some semen. Unluckily for you, the second you pop out of the tank a single German will brain both your guys. A few rounds of this and I learned that while most German infantry are totally harmless, letting them congregate around you for a session of circle jerking is likely to get you killed from that single guy who has a grenade.
Also, to the best of my deductive capabilities, there is a single invisible anti-tank mine located in the village you're supposed to clear out. My luck had me run into it at the bare minimum of two occassions, both when I wasn't looking. Sudden death after 5-10 minutes of murdering various dudes, forcing manual restarting, quickly eroded my nerves.
Following the village you are told to clear out a hill in some random direction and rain destruction on a convoy. Again lone-gunning as usual in most games these days, but armed with a nearly indestructible tank save grenades, and with only 1-2 Germans out of several dozen having a grenade, I wasn't worried!
Oh, wait. The Tank's MG's were totally out of ammo by now. You can't restore ammo, no sir! At least not in any way I've discovered. You can pick up enemy SMG's and stuff but you can't reload the tank. So instead I was forced to master the art of using third-person mode and manually target stuff with the main gun. By now I had been introduced to the extremely flimsy unit AI. It's not only the Germans who take pacts of peace to behemoths of steel, but the other way around as well. The unit AI has a distinct lack of violent tendencies in a game built around gutting people alive with a icecream scooper.
Luckily, third-person offered something a lot more diverse. It seems the game was heavily built with this mode in mind, excluding the fact you can only go into third person control with a single unit. No problem, I've only got one tank, anyways! And he can't really die, right?
Wrong!
This hill is infested with germans. Unlike the area you were just in, almost all of them have grenades. One thing on your side is that most of the Germans seem to be suffering from Bearphobia, and tend to hide in craters or stand out in plain sight, totally ignoring events going on around them. The others will swarm after you given the slightest provocation. A single grenade is usually enough to spell doom for you, despite your ability to absorb virtually indefinite tank shells and anti-tank cannon rounds.
During this adventure, there is a single fuel truck flailing around on top of said hill. Driving back and forth, in a fairly tight circle, over and over and over. This constant remained throughout my multi-hour session in this god-forsaken shithole the Russians called a hill. The convoy in question is loaded with troop trucks and armored cars and bikes. Don't worry about the bikes, though - the pathing of the vehicles always allows the cars to collide with the bikes, causing the bikes to explode and kill their occupants along with anyone else nearby. In fact, these explosions are considerably more violent than your High Explosive shells. You'll learn not to engage the convoy, though. Shooting at them angers the gnat hive, and there aren't many places to run.
I died in almost every way possible in this map. Grenades, suicide, water, alt tab crashing, running out of ammo, it was fucking maddening.
Now I'm on the next mission.
I get to control not 2, but 200 guys in a classic DEFEND THE BACE 30-40 minute extravaganza.
The videos will go up sometime in the future. If I can complete the LP, that is. I'm only on the second fucking mission. I don't know if I can endure this kind of pain for very long. Exhaustion and sleepiness helps. But with every new day comes a new opportunity to flip the living christ fuck out.
/edit
LOL, a lot of the fraps files got screwed up. I have the whole of segment 1 which works but has audio desync. About half the other files seem to have broken headers or something.
It's made by Russians. And it shows.
This is a WW2 RTS. And by RTS I mean RTT because there's no resource collection or base building. Much like Company of Heroes, the game says it's an RTS but it isn't. But, unlike Company of Heroes, this game is made by Russians.
The first thing that will strike you across the face with a brick is the voice acting. Starcraft 2's voice acting is bad. World of Wacraft's voice acting is bad. But until now, the truest champion of ridiculously bad voice acting I've revered was Earth 2160. MoW has a very strong, competitive chance of taking the title away from E2160 as having the worst voice acting I've ever heard. Yes, even worse than the voice acting of Hive Workshop wc3 campaigns!
Considering that the game is made by Russians, and the soviet campaign involves Russian, you'd expect them to sound... Russian! But, they don't. They sound distinctly Amerikan. Between the forced slurring and scarcely detectable accent and the sheer lack of giving a fuck, I can barely believe the dialogue is even voiced by a human and not some elaborate text-to-speech solution from Nigeria.
Having no idea what the fuck I was getting myself into, I started the campaign on Hard and I'm dead-set on finishing it on Hard. The guy who gifted me it has just warned me that there is several missions coming up that will be truly rage-worthy. More rage worthy than what I've just gone through? I can't wait.
You start off the game with absolutely no introduction to the controls at all. Like all modern games, the controls it tells you aren't matched with any rebindings you've made. In a bid to make the game somewhat sensible, I rebound a lot of the keys for abilities and skills that were all previously bound to various F keys. In doing so I just served to confuse the fuck out of myself. You see, the game has an "RTS" control mode and a "third-person" control mode. Both are equally irritating to use. But, this in a moment.
What struck me immediately upon starting the game was not only how horrible it looked but how badly it performed. I was baffled by the shitty performance, where even sc2 performed better under poor circumstances like W&M. As it turns out, this is due to the fog of war. Fog of war defaults to off - I had turned it onto "realistic", aka barely visible, and reverted to Simple. Upon discovering that the fog of war is entirely cosmetic and actually doesn't effect gameplay or unit AI at all, I caved in and turned it back off. +20fps. While recording. In 1920x1200. HOW THE FUCK?!
Out of these five fine young men, only two will be making it past this point in the same dimension.
Confusion turned to absurdity in a heartbeat. You start near a truck. You can put your dudes in the truck. I did just this. I couldn't get some of my dudes out of the truck. I was so fucking confused, because the game introduces you to two generic Russian characters and gives you like 3-4 guys when you start. Unable to extract my additional men (or possibly my two "heroes", I'll never know), I continued on. As it turned out, when the game transitioned between cinematics and parts of the zone, those guys remained permanently stuck inside that truck. The truck, unable to move or do anything, existed only in a fantastical limbo between reality and memories, trapping two of my dudes in it. As it turns out, this made an exceptionally hard mission 42x more retarded.
You come across a bunch more allied dudes who, for but a moment, stand there shooting at nothing. Almost immediately you are given a tank and told to lone-gun an entire fucking German battalion. I did just that - after almost a dozen restarts. As it turns out, enemy infantry will never attack you while you're in a tank. Instead, they'll try to use you for cover. While you're standing still, or while you're moving. The exception to this is if they have a grenade. As I quickly discovered, this particular tank is totally immune to most projectiles in the games. Except grenades. A single grenade will generally dislocate a track or kill you entirely. Luckily for you, your two Russian comrades can somehow sew a fucking tank track back together with their handy dandy wrench and some semen. Unluckily for you, the second you pop out of the tank a single German will brain both your guys. A few rounds of this and I learned that while most German infantry are totally harmless, letting them congregate around you for a session of circle jerking is likely to get you killed from that single guy who has a grenade.
Also, to the best of my deductive capabilities, there is a single invisible anti-tank mine located in the village you're supposed to clear out. My luck had me run into it at the bare minimum of two occassions, both when I wasn't looking. Sudden death after 5-10 minutes of murdering various dudes, forcing manual restarting, quickly eroded my nerves.
Following the village you are told to clear out a hill in some random direction and rain destruction on a convoy. Again lone-gunning as usual in most games these days, but armed with a nearly indestructible tank save grenades, and with only 1-2 Germans out of several dozen having a grenade, I wasn't worried!
Oh, wait. The Tank's MG's were totally out of ammo by now. You can't restore ammo, no sir! At least not in any way I've discovered. You can pick up enemy SMG's and stuff but you can't reload the tank. So instead I was forced to master the art of using third-person mode and manually target stuff with the main gun. By now I had been introduced to the extremely flimsy unit AI. It's not only the Germans who take pacts of peace to behemoths of steel, but the other way around as well. The unit AI has a distinct lack of violent tendencies in a game built around gutting people alive with a icecream scooper.
Luckily, third-person offered something a lot more diverse. It seems the game was heavily built with this mode in mind, excluding the fact you can only go into third person control with a single unit. No problem, I've only got one tank, anyways! And he can't really die, right?
Wrong!
This hill is infested with germans. Unlike the area you were just in, almost all of them have grenades. One thing on your side is that most of the Germans seem to be suffering from Bearphobia, and tend to hide in craters or stand out in plain sight, totally ignoring events going on around them. The others will swarm after you given the slightest provocation. A single grenade is usually enough to spell doom for you, despite your ability to absorb virtually indefinite tank shells and anti-tank cannon rounds.
During this adventure, there is a single fuel truck flailing around on top of said hill. Driving back and forth, in a fairly tight circle, over and over and over. This constant remained throughout my multi-hour session in this god-forsaken shithole the Russians called a hill. The convoy in question is loaded with troop trucks and armored cars and bikes. Don't worry about the bikes, though - the pathing of the vehicles always allows the cars to collide with the bikes, causing the bikes to explode and kill their occupants along with anyone else nearby. In fact, these explosions are considerably more violent than your High Explosive shells. You'll learn not to engage the convoy, though. Shooting at them angers the gnat hive, and there aren't many places to run.
I died in almost every way possible in this map. Grenades, suicide, water, alt tab crashing, running out of ammo, it was fucking maddening.
Now I'm on the next mission.
I get to control not 2, but 200 guys in a classic DEFEND THE BACE 30-40 minute extravaganza.
The videos will go up sometime in the future. If I can complete the LP, that is. I'm only on the second fucking mission. I don't know if I can endure this kind of pain for very long. Exhaustion and sleepiness helps. But with every new day comes a new opportunity to flip the living christ fuck out.
/edit
LOL, a lot of the fraps files got screwed up. I have the whole of segment 1 which works but has audio desync. About half the other files seem to have broken headers or something.