Soldiers: Heroes of World War II Demo (v. 0.1.5) 8.5/10

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II Demo (v. 0.1.5) 8.5/10
Posted :: May 27, 2004 by Haggs

Build Version Tested: Demo 0.1.5
Producer: Codemasters
Projected Release Date: June 2004

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II is still only available in its demo stages, but it offers lots of promise. Though the demo is only 80% complete, it looks like Codemasters has covered all of the major aspects. They have appropriate hot keys to bring up mission objectives and a minimap, as well as allow unit groups to be hot-keyed. The graphics engine created wonderfully detailed environments and units that ran smoothly on our ATI Radeon 9800 (at a 1280x1024x32 resolution and high detail settings). There weren’t many audio settings that allowed us to make use of our Audigy 2 sound card, but the background music and sound effects were still satisfying. The single player demo consists of a single mission (with variable difficulty settings) in which it is your job as the Americans to protect a wounded officer from a German invasion till help can arrive. The Soldiers demo does not involve resource collection, and it did not appear that they planned to implement anything of the sort in the future. This release is purely military mission based combat.

You have one tank that is low on both fuel and ammunition and three controllable soldiers at your disposal. There are some NPC soldiers at the outpost that are there to help you accomplish the objective, but they are not much help. We would have liked to have more control over the other units, but we made do with what we had. The map has some turrets for the soldiers to man, and some sandbag walls for them to duck behind, but when the Germans start pouring in, your American soldiers are quickly overwhelmed. We tried the demo on all of the available difficulty settings numerous times, but could only manage to successfully complete the mission on the easiest setting.

The only thing that we could think of that Codemasters may add in before their final release was unit stances. The soldiers stand up, crouch, and lay down automatically, but it would have been helpful to have more control over their actions to make better use of the barriers. We wish the best of luck to Codemasters as they finish their work on Soldiers, and we are anxiously awaiting an opportunity to check out some multiplayer action.