Review: Officers World War II

Another World War 2 game and I'm beginning to wonder whether more people have died during this conflict on my hard drive or in the real world. Fear not though as Officers brings something new to the table with a fresh approach to RTS gaming that fits in perfectly with the period. So polish those pictures of Rommel you have and prepare for some intense strategic planning.

I'm willing to send wave after wave of my own men

Officers boasts that it uses real tactics from WW2 and for the most part that statement is true. There is no base building or recruitment so you have to do with what you got until reinforcements are provided. Each map is around 25 square kilometres and provide numerous tactical options. Your objective is to capture strategic points on the map, e.g. airfield, factory, railway station etc. These strategic points have smaller less important strategic points surrounding them, but capturing them can weaken the main strategic point and give you a tactical advantage. When you capture a strategic point you can transfer resources between the two in order to resupply certain areas. Your resources include fuel, ammo and food. If these are depleted your advances can come to a grinding halt. You should note that I've only scratched the surface on the level of tactical options available to you.

For example an airfield deep in enemy territory was launching bombers to attack my advancing units, transport plane to drop paratroopers into my own strategic points and spy planes to find out to location of my troops. I dropped my own paratroopers behind the airfield in a nearby forest. I used the trees as cover and hit the airfield in the rear before their units could respond quickly and secured a defensive position. I withstood the counter attack and captured the airfield. The second example involved a feint. I used a weakened squad to attack a factory head on. They engaged and the AI called in its reserves to help out. Previously I had sent my amour on a three mile detour and I used the cover of the hills to mask their movement. When the AI committed its troops I took the factory and attacked the enemy from behind.

Mixed results for the AI

The enemy AI is pretty clever. It constantly attacks you with its own reinforcements and tries each assault differently so you can't really learn off where the attack will come from. They will defend their territory vigorously and constantly harass yours. They will even send units behind your lines to capture strategic points so you will have to guard each territory carefully. I wish I could say from your AI teammate who comes along on certain missions. He seems to be taking orders from General Stupid as he constantly takes a strategic point, leaves it undefended, loses it, gets trapped behind enemy lines and loses his entire army. This slows the advance down to a crawl and puts pressure on your own lines. Other times the AI will ask for your help on an advance and give you 20 seconds to prepare so most of the time you have no nearby units and your reserves are defending its strategic points for them. They go out and attack only to die before I've loaded my own men onto a truck to help them out.

Also, infantry is so weak it seems as though the soldiers are made of papier-mâché. I think it's down to the limitations of the game's engine as there isn't a proper cover system in place for them. Some units aren't as historically accurate as you'd think with howitzers being portrayed as tanks and AT guns. They should be able to shell positions over long ranges, but for some reason they only have the same ranges as tanks and it defeats their purpose.

Three years old, but still looking decent.

Officers has been out in Russia for nearly three years. The graphics are above average, but nothing special. You can zoom out and survey the battlefield and when you zoom right down to the ground the tanks and field guns look the part. However, the infantry don't look anything special when viewed up close and take a cardboard shape when viewed at distance. Most PCs should have no problem running this game at the highest settings and even at a resolution of 1920x1200 I had a FPS count of 170.

The sound in the game could be better. While the unit sounds and explosions are realistic to a certain degree the unit voices are rather painful to listen to. They make stupid statements and it takes away from the game's immersion. The American accents are also very strange sounding. This is particularly evident when you deploy reinforcements to the battlefield.

Where are the Russians?

The vast majority of your time will be spent playing the main campaign. There is only one and it only contains six missions. Before you turn your head away in disgust you should note that each mission usually last for about six hours so there is plenty to do. One thing that is puzzling to me is that the campaign only involves the USA. The box art and main loading screen contains images of Russians and Germans fighting and the box art has American, German and Russian officers on it. While the Germans are present in the game they are unplayable in the main campaign and the Russians are nowhere to be found at all.

When you finish the main campaign you can jump into multiplayer and test your skills against a human opponent. The game also has an editor so expect to see a whole host of custom missions and mods.

This game is sick (in the bad way)

If Officers has one major problem it's the ability to die on a regular basis. I'm using Vista and I realise that it isn't the greatest OS ever, but this game is unplayable at times. It only starts up when it wants to. I only managed to get it to start every other day. Sometimes I'd start up my PC and Officers would run fine, but then other days it refused to get past the intro screen. Crashes when playing the game were rare, but they did occur. They are especially annoying when you have played for about four hours without saving.

Officers also has extremely long loading. You could go away and make a cup of tea while you wait for the game to load and I'm not joking about that. I don't think it's a major problem as the game has to load up the massive maps and units and to be fair it's compensated by the fact that once you load up a mission it's instant load from there on in.

There's plenty of potential in the Officers franchise. Few games manage to capture WW2 this well at the tactical level. But a few problems with friendly AI and stability do drag the score down somewhat. However I'm certainly looking forward to the next instalment.