Though designed on an outstanding game engine, Soldiers is plagued by technical difficulties and frustrating campaigns.
The game engine is one of the best RTS engines I've come across in years. It takes advantage of good resolution textures and great animations, as well as great sound effects and some decent voice acting. The engine brings everything together in a fluid and enjoyable experience, subject to a few minor errors or oversights.
The Soldiers engine looks at least as good as any other current generation RTS, though you'll have to have some serious current-gen hardware before you'll max your framerate in-game. The engine is locked to a variable level frame-rate, but even my AMD 64 3500+ and a BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC dropped below 30 frames per second when it came to a large-scale battle. I can't say for sure, but I hypothesize that it might be due to the game's apparent lack of a dynamic LOD (level of detail) system. Units appear just as detailed when you're zoomed fully out as when you're up close and personal. This might be okay, if you've got a monster of a system, but otherwise, that detail is lost in between the pixels of your monitor.
The interactive environment is one of the game's strong points, as tanks and larger grenades can cause buildings to topple over, leaving rubble on the ground, which you can then use as cover for your troops. Bushes become natural points of ambush, as the enemy won't see you if you hide in the right places. Your troops can even take up residence next to one of your tanks, or even one of the enemy's, though you'd better hope it doesn't move, as you'll become a soldier pancake in no time if you're not careful.
With the dynamic scenery, there is little wrong, though it is sometimes frustrating to point your soldier to the exact right position, especially if the fog-of-war is activated. Additionally, it's somewhat unrealistic that a large part of destroyed building rubble ends up evaporating from the battlefield, leaving only conspicuously large peices behind.
Not only can your soldiers hide in bushes and behind walls, peeking both over and around, they can occasionally inhabit a building's window, conveniently placed for German-mowing. The upper stories of buildings won't be accessible to you, though there will be a German on every other one in the course of the game.
The AI in the game has it's shinig points, but after a while of playing, you'll realize that the direct-control mode availible to you is the only way to kill anything in real-time. For some reason, firing my MG42 full auto is just as accurate as firing one bullet at a time, but since I'm shooting so many bullets, it's no wonder I can kill more than ten times the Germans than my soldiers can in RTS control mode. The AI is also flawed when it comes to your soldiers taking cover. A soldier hiding behind a wall will duck-and-cover from all enemy fire, but not just fire coming from the other side of the wall. He'll curl up into a ball as a German pumps 20 to 30 bullets into his side, all the while thinking that ducking is actually helping his efforts. Just shoot the bastard and be over with it. Your soldiers won't have as many problems if they're taking cover in a bush, as there's nothing for them to duck behind, and the walls you do hide behind don't help that much anyway.
A german soldier throws a grenade into the bush you're hiding in. You quickly dart away from the grenade, temporarily ignoring enemy fire in favor ov avoiding the greater imminent threat. At a safe distance, the grenade detonates, completely destroying the bush that you were just hiding in. Instead of finding new cover immediately, you run back to the scorched bush, perpetually recieving a barrage of bullets from your friendly German neighbors. That's a typical moment, and one sure to be repeated again and again if you're partial to the RTS style control that Soldiers affords. It is, however, inevitable, unless a fury of left mouse button clicks tells your soldier just where to go at the right moment.
Though plagued by some technical issues, the Soldiers engine really shines, but you're also bound to get an "out of sync" error at least once when you try to play one of Soldiers' pleasantly varied multiplayer modes (cooperative is my personal favorite, followed by Battle Zones, oddly reminiscent of Battlefield 1942's flag capture system). For a game that could have been truly great, a lack of post-production support (only one significant update) causes Soldiers: Heroes of WWII to miss out on the action that it really deserves.