A superior budget shooter
Now that I've played the game, I have to confess--it wasn't as good as I hoped. But it WAS better than most reviewers are making it sound. True, the voice acting is bad. I mean, really, REALLY bad. Almost as bad as the text, which seems to have been (mis-) translated from Russian. In one particularly painful cutscene, your character receives a radio transmission from a submarine captain of the "Royal Fleet," who is supposed to be British, but has a noticeable eastern-European accent. Maybe he was an officer in the Free Polish navy.
It's also true that the story makes no sense. It starts promisingly: Nazi scientists are re-animating dead German soldiers to create a secret army of undead super-soldiers. You are Karl Stolz, recently deceased German soldier, and recently re-animated super-soldier. The problem is your uber-power: you can create a blue force-field that stops bullets. Now, to be fair, that's a pretty cool uber-power, and it can be quite useful during the game: the bullets just hang there in midair, and kill any Nazi they touch, as if you'd shot them yourself. But--why a force field? And why do the other uber-soldiers have DIFFERENT super-powers? And why is this your ONLY uber-power? And what's all this nonsense about "being forced to obey the first person who speaks to you"?
Well, whatever. This isn't Shakespeare: it's a shooter. If you're like me, you bought this game to shoot Nazis and blow stuff up--and that's just what you're going to do. The game provides many different varieties of Nazis to shoot, most of whom did not exist in real life--just like the "German Resistance" fighters who help you shoot them. But again--whatever.
The shooting is fast, furious, and quite challenging at times. As in Castle Wolfenstein, you start out with just a knife, and if you keep using it to stab people in the head, you earn extra life. (Don't tell Jack Thompson) If stabbing people in the head is too difficult or too personal for you, the game provides a good assortment of World War II-vintage firearms, most of which you've seen before (though the PzB-41 anti-tank rifle makes a surprise and very welcome appearance). Most of the guns are German, which makes sense, since you're a former German army officer, fighting other Germans, with the help of German resistance fighters: yet, for some reason, there are some Soviet and American weapons lying around as well. (Seriously--they're just lying around, waiting to be picked up.)
By now, you should know the drill: shrug and say, "whatever--they kill people, right?". Right! In fact, Nazis die some pretty spectacular deaths in this game. UberSoldier makes good use of physics, and the frequent explosions really send things flying: at one point, I shot at a Nazi on a rooftop, hit something explosive, and watched amazed as his flaming body was launched into space and rag-dolled down to the pavement. At another point, during the U-Boat mission, I was shooting at an attacking aircraft. It blew up in mid-air, and part of it actually FELL ON ME. You don't see things like THAT in Call of Duty!
In fact, some of the set-piece battles, late in the game, are quite spectacular: Allied aircraft are bombing and strafing, everything is blowing up, and you and your German-resistance buddies are shooting every Nazi in sight: good stuff. The graphics were very good--surprisingly good, in fact. The framerate staggered once or twice when there were too many barrels exploding at once, but otherwise, the game ran surprisingly smoothly from start to finish. If only all full-price shooters could say the same. The environments are very convincing, both before and after they've been demolished. The AI is not great, but no worse than average. It took me about ten hours to complete, on Medium difficulty, and I'll definitely want to play it again.
Overall, UberSoldier was much better than any other budget shooter I've ever played. That's damningly faint praise, I know--a game doesn't have to work very hard to be much better than Mob Enforcer or Codename: Outbreak. But seriously, this is a good game for the price. If you still haven't quenched your thirst for Nazi blood, and you can overlook the silly story and atrocious voice acting, then you won't be disappointed.