By Novotny @ RPS.

And indeed, there is such a note attached to the system specs.

You played it? I tried but it keeps crashing when i try to play the demo. Good marketing

Yeah, i played a tiny bit. It's definitely not Men of War. I can't pass a conclusion yet since I need to spend more time on it and see how it works.

Okay, i played more...

Good:Bad:Ugly

Good:
- Upgrade points to spendon infantry / armour / arty prior to mission. Stuff like machine gun range, light weapons rate of fire, visibility. Gives you a sense of personalisation.
- Textures in uberzoom: Pretty stuff. Nice grass, but unfortunately no griminess.
- Large maps with more realistic landscapes compared to MoW
- Well decorated maps. The towns really look impressive from afar.
- Mission briefings are very tolerable compared to MoW.

Bad:
- No infantry formation options
- Infantry can not interact with cover
- No infantry tactical options like suppress, crawl, scatter, etc.
- Infantry can't mount tanks for transport

Ugly:
- Zoomed out to useful distances, the texture quality and grass is lost, making the game rather ugly. Which is a damn shame given that the zoomed in view looks very credible.
- Sounds are pretty lame and drown out almost completely as you zoom out to your more useful distance. Which doesn't happen. War is loud with cracking shots flying overhead, screeching tank tracks, and screaming men, but this game doesn't have any of that.
- Concealment doesnt exist. There is no such thing as a blind-side. A hill will not offer you concealment from a trajectory weapon on the other side even if theres no way in hell he could have spotted you.
- Movement contraints: The area in which you can travel to in these large maps is restricted pretty badly. It would be impossible to take your units, say, to the middle of the map, if you and your objective are in the bottom left quarter of the map.

Gameplay:
Started off the mission where you have about 50 men, 8 light tanks, 8 medium tanks. Chose my upgrades (infantry range, infantry rate of fire, infantry somethingelse). First thing i notice is that infantry and tanks are pre-grouped and fixed like that. You command groups, not individuals... ok. Second thing i notice, me being me, is that there is no such thing as inventory. Your objective is to take a hill occupied by 30 infantry in the circular trench, three 88's, 1 AT gun. I survey the landscape to assess tactical options. I see that the objective hill is surrounded by open ground almost all around. To the left there are some trees over a ravine that almost come to touching the circular trench on top of the hill, definitely within grenade range. My plan would be to divert the enemies attention on the right by firing like crazy from afar, and at the same time have 2 infantry squads make their way up to the trench slowly, and charge into the trench using grenades if needs be. By the look of the trees and ravine, the infantry should have both cover and concealment until they come very close to the trench.

So i make the infantry head off carefully to take up positions and rather dissappointingly, very soon they come under 88 trajectory fire. There's no way in hell they could know they're there, so I pull the infantry out of range. No casualties thankfully. With that option out of the window, i scratch my head for more. I assess the terrain once again and spot a lone group of manned but unsupported Nebelwerfers in the middle-ish of the map. I think, great, I can take some infantry down with light tank support to capture them and blast the jesus out of the hill. Wrong. Before i get anywhere near the middle of the map, it's simply not possible to click on the ground to move units there. This is where that game has seriously pissed me off.

Out of tactical options, for curiousities sake, I proceed to execute the attack as the fucking game originally wanted me to which is a frontal assault with everything I have. Talk about linearity. So i line up my men and tanks and charge up the hill. Obviously I take the hill, losing perhaps 5 tanks and 10 infantry, but for fuck sake, those casualties could have been avoided with a more discreet attack. Attacking the hill en-mass felt unsophisticated and consuming, like beating a guy to death with an overtly sized dildo.

MoW is more tactical and that's saying something.

haha, fantastic read, thanks.

Conclusion: No need to try and fix my problem i guess

heh, that sounds positively retarded. Ok, good to know. Not that I really like MoW all that much, but damn.

Batman: Arkham Asylum demo is out, at a paltry 2 gigs

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/08 ... more-15633

Check the gameplay vids - looks like a ton of fun. And it's batman dammit! Might just wait for the full game befoire getting the demo though, a little much download for my monies.

Batman? I find batman the lamest of all superheroes.

I'm a Punisher / Wolverine kinda guy myself. Not too big on the bat. Though I think superman is one of the most lame superheroes.

No way, Superman is a slick daddy. He can fly and is invincible and has super strength. What more do you want?

Never heard of Punisher. Sounds like some kind of jail specific hero.

Wolverine I don't really like cos everyone does. X-Men used to be cool before the movies. For some reason I always liked Gambit, but tbh, not really into X-Men.

Best superhero ever....



Slight possiblity of being a paedofile though.

Punisher is less of a superhero and more of a badass with guns and little in the way of morals. You seriously haven't heard of him? He's got movies!

Yea, The Punisher movie is actually one of the comic book movies i like. I have the first game but i failed to complete it because i became bored.

EDIT: no i failed to complete it because the minigames were fucked up, for some reason when you had to bash someones head against a table my mouse wouldnt work.

Installing Batman atm, however i've been warned that i failed the system requirements, so that's not very promising

Let us know how it is J Very interested in this game

Derf: Superman cool? Wha? Superman is way lamer than batman! At least Batman isn't "superhuman", which makes him sympathetic in a way...same with the Punisher. Superman is so incredibly powerful that most stories involving him could be solved by simply taking out kryptonite from the equation. There's barely anything else that will stop him.

Anyway, I think a lot depends on the Batman you grew up with. The cheesy-ass original Adam West Batman from the 70's TV show, yeah, that was ultrolame. But the Batman of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns/Dark Knight Strikes Again comic books is a sick puppy struggling with moralism and walking a thin line between fascism and heroism. Even the latest movies made him look cool.

As far as superheroes go I'll always like The Juggernaut though. Virtually invulnerable, monstrously strong, basically unstoppable...but a huge, dumb tool.



Symbiont spiderman is cool too. And The Sandman. And Dr. Manhattan. And The Comedian.