A View From the Trenches

In April of 2008, I went to Moscow to visit KRI, the games normal for the Republic of Independent States (largely made up of those nations formerly attached to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). KRI attendees included a range of studios from across the part, from small student projects to the makers of large multi-format games that Russian mega-publisher 1C hoped would gap into Western markets in 2009. The convention took direct in the vast 1970s "Kosmos" hotel, which is a monument – among an entire district of space-monuments – to the attitude and architecture at the to of the Cold War.

The 21st-100 Kosmos foyer is now a kitsch hybrid of Vegas neon (Yuri Gagarin bar!) and black marble, while the suite and corridors are Natalie Wood-paneled like the innards of an old racing yacht. It was in one of these rooms that I met a manufacturer for Best Way, a Ukrainian serious-time strategy game developer. Grey and furrowed, atomic number 2 wore the face of trillion cigarettes. Helium greeted me with the exhausted look and brief, hard handshake of a man who had seen overmuch in his time. When we sat low to talk about his game, however, helium came alive.

The Russian games scene is now as diverse As whatever in the world, and I'd already seen a 4X brave, a War god clone, a turn-based RPG/strategy title, a post-calamity racing game, a survival-revulsion FPS, a fighting lame and a flight sim. By the time I came to my worn companion's presentation, I was no longer sure what to bear. But it was his spirited that would delight me above any of the others. It was Men of War, one of the numerous installments in the "of Warfare" series produced by Ukrainian developer Best Way.

I had previously unnoticed Best Way's games, assuming they were to a fault fiddly and expressed for me to bother with. Everything I had read about their output left me therewith "Sooner State if you can put in the effort" residue that steers me away from umpteen obscure niches of gaming. But after sitting through the studio apartment's wizened spokesman's meticulous, active presentation – translated and mediated by a Russian woman who clearly had no idea how anyone could get mad about this sort of obscurity – it would non be something I e'er ignored again. When IT arrived in the U.K. in early 2009, I lost an entire week to it. On the spur of the moment, the games took on a new signification.

Before Men of War, I'd entirely surrendered abreast the World War II strategy genre; I even found Relic's Company of Heroes series a little tearless. How could this recovered-trodden subject matter and gameplay ever be interesting again? Best Way's answer lay in their almost absurd ambition. Men Of Warfare demonstrates a kinda game design philosophy we seldom get wind, one that says you should allow for arsenic umteen possibilities in your game world as you can. Sooner than begin with the basics and crop up from there, Best Way seems to have started with a list of every scenario that can occur on a field of honor, then tried to make each item a distinct possibility. It's plainly reproof-dropping in Men of War when a tank waterfall through ice on a frozen river operating room when fire from an exploding vehicle propagates across a sedgelike field, because you assume that the scenery is unchangeable. But in this crippled, almost zip is.

The grizzled Best Agency producer introduced me to this high-concept realism past explaining how two contrary types of shells worked when fired from a tank. Maiden, he showed me how to use armor-piercing shells to germinate straight finished a building and cripple vehicles on the other side. High-unstable shells, interim, explode connected impact, flattening the building and reducing the quantity of cover available to nearby infantry. (It goes without expression that altogether the scenery in Hands of War is fully destructible.) This demonstrated one of the most important features of Best Way's games: direct, granulose control over your army. At whatsoever point, you can take charge of a exclusive unit as if you're playing a third gear-person fulfill gamy. You may have dozens of troops on the field of operation at any one time, but you can always seize responsibility for their one-on-one actions, crucial where a single machine-cannoneer will crawl and fire, or driving a tank through the side of a particular building.

This sympathetic of obsessive concentrate on the gameplay implications of technical detail seems nerdy in the extreme, but when I played the full brave few months later, the results took me by surprise. The first thing you notice is that all individual soldier on the battlefield has his personal inventory. There may be hundreds of infantrymen, but each one has his own razor-sharp weapons, ammunition, grenade, medkit and helmet. It seems almost unpaid in its detail, until you find yourself out of ammo and pushed into a box – you backside loot the bodies of your fallen comrades to stay in the fight.

Future, I hooted with incredulity after picking up an anti-army tank rifle and using it to turn the surge of an total battle – not because such a scenario was unlikely, just just because hither was a real-time strategy game where so much things were in reality affirmable. I found myself stealing motorbikes, patching up tanks for nonpareil last stand, laying mines I found in crates and exploitation stolen sniper rifles to decimate entrenched enemies. It is Eastern Samoa if in that respect are too numerous variables for any two battles to extend on the same lines, regardless how with kid gloves you might attempt to play a particular scene or skirmish.

This deceptive complexity helped me understand Best Agency's seemingly bland choice of title. Men of Warfare sounds like information technology popped straight out a generic figure generator, simply in fact it's entirely apropos. This is the rare RTS where the actions of individual men on the field truly matter, where the heroic deaths of these tiny heroes takes on a poignancy unheard of in any strange strategy game, precisely because of what these little chaps are adequate of. Left to their own devices, they will use cover, go prone and even endeavor to lob anti-tank grenades at vehicles that get inside range. Simply when you step into the shoes of an individual soldier, you bring i both the power to singlehandedly influence the tides of battle and an entirely new perspective on the action.

The second level of Men of War is more corresponding a battlefield feigning than that of whatever classical RTS. Flourish after fla of Germans attack a Russian compound in a battle you will eventually lose. You can't set much to nullify your fate, and you're left to watch your men courageously fight to death every bit you make little tweaks and adjustments here and in that location, on occasion taking control of a particular individual to perform alive tasks. The capacity of the game to confuse radically different scenarios at the thespian is what makes it much fascinating terrain. Tiny skirmishes explode into rich-scale battles in the duration of a single level. Villages are flattened in toilsome, hour-long tank-engagements. Single men make the ultimate forfeiture to stave off defeat. It's spectacular stuff.

That's non to enounce it's perfect – it's not. It's too demanding, and the voice acting is terrible. The A.I. pathfinding occasionally freaks out, and not all the vehicles work as they should. But sometimes the type and dream of a game is enough to smudge the flaws away. Aft all, what other RTS nates be truly called "heart-breaking"?

Just earlier authorship this, I played A level of the brand-new expanding upon, Red-faced Tide. My attempt to free a village from National socialist-aligned troops came down to a unwed machine-gunner who was able to flank and gun down a radical of enemy cannoneers. After killing perhaps a dozen enemy crewmen, he was besmirched by an enemy fomite. I tried to run for extend, only a single bullet short him, knocking him to the ground. Wounded, atomic number 2 crawled into a trench, only to represent found by opposition soldiers as atomic number 2 urgently tried to mend himself up. They gunned him down. I sat upward out of my chair screaming: "He's a tiny frickin' hero!"

In its possess small way, Men of War is a testament to obscure Acts of heroism. The very idea of the unremembered soldier is, someway, remembered here – in an obscure Russian videogame, of all things. I salute it.

Jim Rossignol is an editor at RockPaperShotgun.com and the source of This Gaming Life, an account of the life of modern videogames and approximately of the people World Health Organization play them.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/a-view-from-the-trenches/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/a-view-from-the-trenches/

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