Graphics: Soldiers uses its own proprietary engine to render the environments of the European front. The net effect is a game as detailed as Commandos 2 was in its time, but in full 3D. Details are everywhere, down to the smallest things: You have to look close, but even dropped guns retain their attached tripod, clip size, stock shape and relative length as they lie in the dust. Explosions are filled with billowing smoke and roaring fires, and show off some excellent particle effects. Likewise, the landscape is varied and natural looking for the period, with little rolling hills, plenty of trees and bushes, decaying and bombed out buildings and war-torn streets. There’s a little pixilation in the foliage, your troops pivot instead of turn and instructional text runs out of the border and into the game screen if you’re playing anything less than 1280×1024, but those things are pretty minimal, all things considered. The engine also starts to chew up resources when too many troops appear on screen, so you’ll want to stay nearer the recommended specifications than the minimum allowable hardware. In general, though, Soldiers does a fantastic job of hitting the graphical nail on the head.

Interface: When I clicked the autorun menu’s “Install” option, Soldiers sprouted a Windows XP dialog box that claimed I could only run the installation from the Control Panel. I was able to bypass that problem by starting setup directly from the CD. After everything was installed, there was a protracted waiting period on the first launch as the copy protection went through extensive testing of my CD to ensure it was authentic before I could enter my key code. Once inside the game, I found all of the expected toggles, sliders and options for the likes of color depth, video size, visual details, camera scroll speed, audio quality and a myriad of volume controls. The only thing missing was the ability to remap your own controls.

When playing Soldiers, you’ll use the keyboard and mouse exclusively. The bulk of the screen renders the action, but there’s a control bar that runs along the bottom containing all of the things you’ll need to interact with this presentation of 1940′s Europe. The camera allows you to zoom in and pan around 360 degrees so you can see the action from multiple angles. The zoom doesn’t go in or out far enough, nor does the camera swing far enough to the ground, but the camera’s capabilities are suitable enough to pass muster. When selecting a unit, a soldier’s picture and vital statistics or a vehicle’s damage map will appear. If multiple objects are selected, a smaller version of the unit’s portrait or damage map with only a health meter will show up. Additionally, when a vehicle is selected, its passenger compartments appear either empty or contain the portrait of the unit in the seat. Clicking on the portrait ejects the selected person. There’s also a Commandos-style control cluster that has the corner of a map, ammo clip and checklist sticking out so you can pull up the mini-map, reload a saved game or see your objectives with the click of a button. Other controls like rotation, drop and attack are near this same area. Predefined keyboard shortcuts are available for all actions so you don’t have to take your eyes off of what’s happening on the screen.

Gameplay: As I mentioned before, Soldiers‘ gameplay will be familiar to anyone who’s gone through Commandos, but it’s not exactly the same. For one thing, there are places where Soldiers is flat out harder than any mission Commandos ever dreamt up. You still command a minimal force going up against full base camps of the enemy, but the opposition in Soldiers is a little sharper than in Commandos. (This is discussed in greater detail in the Intelligence and Difficulty section.) This in and of itself makes things more complex, but you’re also constantly confronted with enemy armor so that you’re also outgunned and under armed. There’s balance in all things, so grenades will at least take out a tank’s tracks so it can’t chase you, even if you aren’t able to pierce the skin of the thing. There’s also no fog of war, so you’re never totally blindsided by anything except for some of the scripting cues. Additionally, once you’ve completed a mission and seen how the pieces fit together, it’s easier the second time through. A mission that took me several hours to complete on the first pass I was able to run through in 30 minutes when I played it again.

Even when you have a tank of your own, you’ll find yourself constantly outnumbered and overwhelmed. In one instance, I ended up facing down two waves of six tanks each, all spewing bazooka launching troops and guys toting anti-tank grenades, with only my two tanks for resistance. Soldiers can be as taxing on the nerves as well as on the virtual ammo supplies as it dishes out all you can take and a little more. You’ll end up reloading saved games a lot. Scripted sequences can be annoying, especially when they regenerate troops from off of the edges of the map. In the above case, I was trying to defend a town from being retaken, so I killed all 12 of those incoming tanks along with the dozens of explosives-carrying ne’er-do-wells while keeping my tanks from disintegrating. After all that, my tanks immobilized but still intact, a respawning light armored vehicle triggered on its regular schedule and went roaring through town from the other side of the map. The computer counted that as an enemy getting into town, and I failed the mission with one minute left on the clock. I count that as a bug, but it still made me angry.

In another spot, this scripted triggering activity forced me to think outside of my normal approach and ended up doing me a favor. I was supposed to rescue paratroopers from a heinous firefight, but I kept getting flanked by regularly spawning Nazi troops. After killing several dozen of them and not making any headway on the fight inside the walls I had to clear, I moved around the back of the building to catch my breath. After a few seconds of looking around, I realized I could use my last rocket-propelled grenade to blow out the back wall of the building and enter it that way. A tank pulled up shortly after I created my new entry, but I was able to retrieve my paratrooper friends and then go back out this fresh aperture, completely avoiding the tank and the troops out front. It was satisfying to discover that new way of thinking, but more often than not, the respawning troops caused me headaches rather than relief. On the note of blowing out the back wall, it bears mentioning that all of Soldiers‘ terrain has the cool cache of being entirely destructible with the proper implements. Walls can be blasted with grenades and buildings leveled with high explosive rounds or bombs. Tanks can also roll over or through most anything, and the visual effect is mischievous fun.

Direct Control is a cool idea, but you end up wanting to use it all the time instead of letting the AI do some work because invariably the AI will get blown up in situations where you wouldn’t. This presents a problem, since in order to properly set up ambushes and execute winning strategies, you have to be in multiple places at once. It’s easier to take your strongest unit, be it tank, armored car or soldier with a really big gun, and leave the rest hiding in a bush while you forge off to do the dirty work. You can always call them when the coast is clear. There’s also the difficulty of changing ammunition types or scrolling around the screen when in Direct Control mode because the aiming reticule follows the mouse pointer. When you go down to change ammo, your turret starts to turn down, too. Likewise, scrolling the map sideways with the mouse moves the turret away from your current target and over to the left or right. In some cases, this doesn’t matter all that much, but some turrets reposition so slowly that even negligible mouse movement can cost you dearly. Additionally, the movement keys can’t be remapped, so you’ll end up scrunching over to the directional arrows instead of being able to customize your experience, causing some physically and tactically uncomfortable moments. However, when you only have to control one unit and it works the way you want it to, Direct Control adds quite a bit to the experience.

Multiplayer: Soldiers contains a cooperative LAN multiplayer component wherein you can tackle any of the game’s story or bonus campaign maps with up to four friends. Unfortunately, since we only received one copy of the title for review, we were unable to set up a LAN match, so this criterion isn’t rated.

Sound FX: Soldiers pairs its graphical pleasures with audible evidence that a lot of detail went into the title. Guns all have unique reports, explosions from various types of grenades have different tonal qualities, and you can hear everything from the grinding of tank tracks to troop movement noises. There’s also a fair amount of ambient sound as birds sing and waves lap the shore. Voice acting is unilaterally good and all of the accents sound native, though it seems that the same actor does both the German and English narration.

Musical Score: Soldiers‘ menu music is the only redeemable track in the game. It has a thoughtful yet grand feel that sounds as big as the conflict going on during World War II. When you’re playing, however, it’s a different story. While each campaign does have its own compositions, the same short piece (and in some campaigns, the same six notes) plays over and over until you feel like your ears might start to bleed. Thankfully, there’s a quickly accessible volume slider that turns off the music.

Intelligence & Difficulty: The AI opponent in Soldiers reminded me of the resistance in Commandos, but also differed in several important ways. For one, Soldiers‘ baddies seemed to have a pretty good memory and don’t go right back to what they were doing right away. Some enemies will continue searching for you for quite awhile and even fire toward bushes where you were last seen. They’ll eventually forget all about you, but there are times when, if you’re not careful, you’ll not only have to hide and wait it out, but also keep moving from cover to cover so they don’t land on top of you. Also, if you make a commotion, it’s not just a few guys who respond to the noise, it’s an entire contingent of soldiers and mechanized armor. There are just as many scripted moments as there are honest evidences of artificial intelligence, but it still keeps you on your toes.

Soldiers starts every new level with a choice between easy, normal or hard. There’s no description of what each of these things mean in the manual, but from what I could discern, the main difference between the options is centered on damage taken, both by your men and theirs. On easy, one shot generally kills your enemy, while the opposing units lose the ability to aim and don’t do much damage when they do hit you. Normal evens the playing field for both sides and hard swings the pendulum in the enemy’s favor by making them excellent shots and allowing their bullets to do a considerable amount of damage while yours do less. Difficulty options don’t seem to affect the AI at all. You can get yourself in just as precarious a situation on easy as you can on hard.

Overall: Soldiers: Heroes of World War II is a challenging and, at times, mind-bogglingly hard real-time strategy offering. There’s always a way to finish each mission if you have the patience to find it, and patience really is the key to Soldiers. It’s a satisfying strategic adventure if you have the persistence to overcome its quirks and nuances, but it’ll frustrate you senseless if you don’t want it bad enough. Fans of Commandos and Silent Storm will be the most likely groups to find their groove, but anybody looking for a good test of strategic mettle will find something to like about Soldiers.