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Tired of all the hype and BS.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: March 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

You know, I am sick of all the hype about this game by a bunch of weenies that don't seem to know real combat, real weapons or realism of any sort beyond what they see on their TV screens.

This game is not the authentic real life war on-the-battlefield war game that all the geeks are hyping and signing the party line the company puts out.

I bought two of these games after reading the reviews and I have to say that you people don't know what you are talking about.

There is pseudo-realism and that is about it. Sure the maps are close, the look and sounds of the weapons are close and even the dialog is about right, but that is about as far as it goes.

These games fall down severely on the accuracy/authenticity in several key areas.

1.Ludicrous restriction on the tactical options available to the soldiers and the squad leaders. Some of this is bad level design, some of it is probably trying to make up for the limitations of their AI, and some of it is just plain dumb.

2. Ridiculous limitations on interaction with the environments. You cannot open doors or windows. You cannot climb fences. You cannot use the wire cutters that every paratroop carried. You cannot go under a normal barbed wire fence, which thousands of hunters do several times a day in america.

Barrels and crates don't blow up or even move when hit by a tank. You can't even climb over a low wall that some other men just went over.

Perhaps most unforgivable of all, you cannot go into a prone position or crawl. You know, the stuff they teach everyone in BASIC TRAINING!

3. The gunsights are ludicrous. The amount of creep even in a crouching position is ridiculous. If I was that shakey I'd head for the retirement home.

4. Terrible path blocking and object collision detection. Quite a few times when I had a perfect view of a target and as perfect a sight picture as you would ever want I could not hit the target no matter how many rounds I fired. In real life I would have put a round through both ears of my target.

5. Absurd size of the weapons relative to your field of vision when zoomed in. Come on folks this is ridiculously UN-authentic. There is a reason for the open sights on fast action weapons like the Thompson and other SMG weapons.

6. Really stupid scenario designs. There are several instances where you are put face to face with tanks and no tactical options except to run for enemy panzerfausts. Making this worse of course are the level designs that force you to follow a relatively linear and restricted path to said anti-tank weapons. This is completely ridiculous.

7. Poor level designs. Too many places you cannot go or step when you should be able to. Places you cannot jump over or crawl under where you should. Only in EIB do you get to even blow holes in the hedges with the TNT that all paratroops carried as part of their standard pack during that theater of operations, and then only in key places and one whole scenario.

8. Situational awareness mode. Give me a break. This is supposed to substitute for the advance study done by the troops? It's not even as good as a raw topo map dump. You are chained to camera angles around key points and there are no indications of any significant type for changes in elevation and quite often the terrain features are faded out due to the choices made for the camera angle.

9. Another limiting factor is that you cannot issue movement commands to a location you know is there but are not lined up on directly yourself and you had better be on the side away from the enemy when you issue the order. This could have been easily fixed by using some option to issue commands while in situational mode, especially if that were better done.

10. Lastly the much hyped authentic tactics. Authentic, sure, in a very introductory and watered down way, severely limited in permutations, applications and variations due to all the other limitations of the game.

By the way, I am both a veteran and an experienced programmer and I am highly disappointed with this game on both counts.

If this is the latest in realism then it shows what a sorry state the gaming industry really is in. Of course I still haven't seen AI in a commercial game yet that matched up to what I saw undergrad programmers doing in college during the 80s. We deserve better and it's not that hard to do. It's time we stopped allowing these companies to hype this stuff up like it is so great when it's all fluff like pretty pictures and sound.

Oh, one PS. The AI cheats. You can observe how the enemy becomes magically aware of things completely out of the blue, such as someone being behind them, not moving or firing, and behind cover. This is inexcusable.

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