The best military action/shooter/RTS game out there bar none - but you need a little patience to get into it.
Company of Heroes? Can't stand it. Very pretty but it's just Dawn of War in WWII, prop your chin in your hand and gaze vacantly at the screen pointing and clicking...yawn...snooze...
Faces of War? What happened there? Such a shame. Was supposed to be a follow up to Soldiers but they just ruined it trying to run it as a squad based game rather than individual soldiers and with too many enemies. Total chaos, awful, uninstall, back on Amazon. I have my own ideas of how to produce a follow up to the excellent Soldiers; publisher - contact me!
So now I am back to playing Soldiers for a third time on my new PC (the one I built especillay for CoH...what a disappointment but on the other hand running Soldiers on max settings breathes new life into it too).
So whinges out of the way, what is Soldiers about?
For me it is the most realistic WWII RTS-'style' game out there. You do everything that CoH promised but failed to deliver. (I say 'style' as it has strategy but you can be a third person shooter too and even role play to an extent by using certain equipment.)
This game is very realistic: If you lay a mine and a light AFV hits it the explosion will make you jump - that AFV is toast. If you hit a personnel mine with a heavy panzer it will just take out your track and immoblise it. Same for panzerschrecks-hit something small and it's gone, hit a tank from the front and it might bounce off or need a few hits but you can aim for the tracks or the engine to stop it. If it happens to you, take out any infantry with the machine gun then pop a man out of the tank, give him the repair kit and he can fix it. Brilliant! In CoH you have to lay entire minefields to do anything useful as each little 'pop' will only take a bit of health off a tank running across them (and it keeps running!). What sort of realism is that?
Buildings ARE written in blocks that can be partially destroyed - use a high explosive shell or satchel charge to take them down (nice tutorial in CoH doing the same thing, never saw it again in the game). You can even take out the enemy inside just by burying them in the rubble.
So many things to look for too - usually looted from vehicles, supply crates and downed soldiers: bazookas, sniper rifles, heavy machine guns, assorted grenades with various ranges and effects (sticky bombs particularly useful) etc etc. One of the best effects is lobbing a grenade into the back of a building and seeing the enemy come flying out through the front windows. Do the same thing to see how high you can lift that guy out of the machine gun nest! Which type of grenade works best? What is the range you can throw each one?? Great stuff, total realism. True, it's a bit cartoony but that gives it the fun element; what a blend!
No resource gathering other looking after the men that you start with (use cover, the mouse tells you how); just loot stuff from the fallen and make sure you have enough bullets. If you have a few soldiers always try and get a heavy machine gunner, bazooka and rifle amongst them. Brilliant mixture of missions from 4 campaigns too: US, UK, German, Russian. The German one is particularly good as it attempts to recount the Michael Wittman story at Villers Bocage (okay not very accurately - it's a game - but it's a good angle!). Loads of ways to complete each mission too so this is why my third time through it (in about a year) is also still fresh).
The best bit must be the direct control system. Should be in all games like this. Sure, you can point and click your tank but it's better to toggle this control on and off and drive it with the cursor keys while aiming and shooting with the mouse. This is the bit that takes some patience to grasp but once you do it becomes second nature and you can drive anything in any direction with precision, flank those panzers to hit them in the rear! Do the same with soldiers and your rifle man becomes a one shot-one kill sniper. Did I say it was realistic already...?
I could enthuse for hours about this game. It's a bargain bin measly couple of quid/bucks and if you give it a fair learning curve you'll never put it down.