Equal parts fun and frustration - not for the faint of heart or short of patience.
Description
No doubt about it, Men of Valor is the best Vietnam shooter available today on the console front. But I'll be the last to say that it's not without its share of problems.
The game will keep you hooked to finish its roughly 15 hour single player campaign, though a good chunk of that time will be spent watching the death summary screen, while screaming "What the hell was that?!" or "Geez, thanks a bunch, guys!" at the horrible AI of your fellow US Marines. And that's on the 'Easy' setting. Just do your best not to chuck your controller at the screen.
The game is equal parts fun and frustration. You'll fight your way through a few levels, shoulder to shoulder with your squad; having the time of your life with a great deal of satisfaction. Then you hit a brick wall of a level, where you'll continually die 10 seconds into a firefight because of stacked odds, horrible AI, or game bugs. Example: Some areas have respawning enemies, and until you start killing them from close enough up, they'll just continue to respawn over and over, while meanwhile their 2 buddies behind the log over to the left flank somehow snipe you from twice the range through a tree you've crouched behind. Another example: Several times you will be reloading, only to watch with disbelief as your friendly troop and an NVA soldier walk past each other, at which time the NVA soldier fires directly into your face and you see nothing but the sky. Trust me, you'll see this and many other horribly stupid and unrealistic AI occurrences throughout the game. Last example: The game can just be purely buggy. During more than one sequence, I was pelted from the side or back with a hail of bullets from enemy fire coming from the forest "wall". Now, I thought at first that this was the realistic portrayal of NVA tree sniping, but quickly learned otherwise, when in one case the squad started screaming about a tree sniper after we cleared out the other enemy to trigger the next scripted event (apparently the sniper didn't wait for his cue), and in the other sequence it turned out the enemies on the hill we were retaking behind the tree wall were somehow able to get a bead on me through the tree wall. That's not realistic portrayal. That's just frustrating gameplay.
AI problems, as mentioned earlier, plague the game. Your men do not die (except a select few during scripted events), so logically they do not seek the best cover - why bother? Be prepared to see your buddies casually crouched behind a tree while sprays of blood puff from their backs. Be ready to get up close and personal with NVA soldiers when they blindly run into you as you pump rounds into them. And be ready when turrets hone into your position at the bottom of a hill while your men run left, right and center, halfway up said hill. It really kills the realism. And would it kill the developers to let you issue maybe just a FEW commands to your squad, like "the guy's 4 feet in front of you, idiot" or "why are you letting all those guys run past you to shoot me"??
Game bugs also kill the sense of realism. In one area, my men seemed glued to the ground at the first clearing while I casually ran through a level devoid of enemies. Once in a while, a dispossessed voice of my buddy Smooth would yell "Ambush! They're everywhere!", and one NVA would run out of the trees and past me while I turned and shot him in the back. In the previous level, I watched Smooth run backwards across the entire battlefield and through the tree wall, never to be seen for the rest of the sequence.
The replay value on a heavily scripted game such as this is not huge. Apart from multiplayer, the second time around is too predicable, unless you have the patience to break in another greenhorn with the cooperative mode (just prepare to tell them "I know the bad guy walked right past our guys to killed you - just watch for that the next time.")
The controls took a tiny bit of time for me to get used to them, as things such as switching gun modes (from Auto to Semi-Auto, for example) was not as responsive in tight situations as I would have liked. Players used to cover-reliant games will fall right into line here, as cover is the order of the day to stay alive (just don't assume that your cover will actually stop bullets though...).
The flawed save system and long load times add further, albeit only slight, aggravation.
But don't let these rants scare you off the game. If I had seen some of the reviews before getting my hot little hands on a copy of the game, I would not have picked it up. Despite the problems, I'm still playing it, and it is genuinely fun. It's just, once in a while... I want to break the game disc with my teeth. It happens.
On the plus side, they've done some things really right.
The graphics for the most part are great. Explosions rock your screen, fuzzing your vision and hearing. The developers have done a superb job of making the jungle seem like a jungle. No flat, poorly textured tree with one or two shrubs and ferns here. It gets downright dense at times. The only downfall is the animation of the US soldiers, which can be jerky and downright goofy.
The sound effects really immerse you in the environment as bullets whiz past you and the mortars fly. The voices are great, though you may start to hear some of the same dirty mouthed phrases a bit often during intense firefights.
And when it comes down to it, when the game is fun it is really fun. And that's the main thing. There are a TON of FPS out there (I have lots of them), but this will still have a place in your library, if only for a couple weeks until some of the next round of super-shooters are released.
