If you've never played it you haven't missed much

User Rating: 5 | Men of Valor PC
By godverdommer | Review Date:
Men of Valor uses the Vietnam War as a backdrop for this FPS - a theater of war mostly ignored by the genre and the developers deserve credit for trying to explore it, but not much more else. The graphics are nothing to gripe about - about on par with other games from that period, e.g. the first Call of Duty. The soundtrack and voice acting is also fine and in step with the mood of the game. I can't say the same about the weapon sounds - all types of guns encountered in the game share the same generic rat-tat-ta and don't resemble real life at all. Character movements work generally OK, you can lean from behind cover to shoot, but can't jump or run. There's no true iron sights aiming - you only get this pseudo precision aim where the gun traverses slightly toward the center and your cross-hairs become tighter. One major drawback of this stance is you cannot move from place while it's engaged only lean sideways. None of this matters anyway as the enemies are invisible most of the time and you'll be shooting blindly trying to scan the dense brush until your aiming reticle turns red (how fun !) and then guessing if you've done enough damage to be safe from returning fire. Besides the ban on jumping and running, any rock log or mud bank represents impenetrable obstacle making you feel like your character is fighting in a wheelchair. This in addition to the ever present green "walls" of the jungle, although these are only off limits to your side of the conflict as you'll soon find out.
The most aggravating aspect of the game are certainly the super-natural abilities granted to the AI enemies. Peasants wielding the high recoil AK-47s at improbable distances become deadly accurate marksmen. When both you and the enemy are obscured by vegetation they can always somehow hit you as if your character was wearing a homing beacon. Lay prone and you still get shot. You'll see anonymous tracers of rounds fired by the not yet rendered enemies over the horizon tearing you to shreds with little to do about it. They are somehow allowed to slip through the aforementioned "green wall" as well as shoot through it. At times bullets even penetrate walls. You'll regularly encounter invincible machine gun nests which are allowed to spray rounds with impunity as their personnel is always bulletproof and you'll have to partake in a suicide mission to mark them with smoke for the artillery. When time comes for your character to get behind a fixed machine gun though you enjoy no such immunity and become a stationery target. I don't recall another shooter where it was this easy to get killed. I observed instances where my character got shot just once and the health meter went down by 90% (this all happens at normal difficulty). At the same time you can empty your clip into the enemy and he keeps running. In terms of player aggravation this game has no equals. The developers obviously didn't grasp the fine balance between challenge and playability or fun. The player has to be able to believe that success is attainable as you learn and get better in a particular scenario. There's nothing to learn in this senseless mayhem where all things are so overwhelmingly slanted in favor of the enemy that it should have been named "Suicide Vietnam".

"Dear Mr and Mrs Roland Shepherd
It is my sad duty to inform you that your son perished on the virtual battlefield of Vietnam. He died of boredom and frustration while reviving himself for the 507th time in yet another poorly thought out and scripted scenario of this half baked and forgettable shooter. Let the rest of us hope that through his sacrifice we'll be saved from such dreadful affairs in the future."

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