Men of War: Vietnam - Special Edition

Company of Heroes trained a whole generation to treat cover as a system: park the squad behind a wall, watch the shield icon light up, let the math resolve. Men of War: Vietnam deletes that abstraction. Cover is whatever the physics engine says is still standing after the last burst, your fireteam is four or five individually simulated soldiers rather than one unit with a shared health bar, and nothing on screen tells you whether a round will punch through that hut wall. You find out by firing. That single difference is the entire pitch, and it explains both the loyal defenders this thing still has and the Mixed rating parked on its store page. Mechanically this is real-time tactics with the resource layer surgically removed. No base, no build queues, no income tick. You start a mission with the men and vehicles you are given, and everything after that is logistics you perform by hand. Every soldier carries an inventory. Grenades, bandages, rifle magazines and rocket rounds are tracked as individual items, so the fastest way to keep fighting is to walk somebody over to a body and take what is on it. Vehicles are crewed rather than owned, which means a burning transport is a chance to pull the gunner out and put him somewhere useful. Then there is Direct Control, the mechanic that hooks people: drop into one unit, drive it with the keyboard, aim the shot yourself. Landing a manual rocket hit on armour you could never have killed through the order interface is why this series has a cult. Newcomers bounce off hard, and it is almost always the same three mistakes. First, playing it like an RTS and moving everyone at once. You want two or three men advancing while the rest hold overwatch, because losses are permanent inside a mission and no reinforcements are coming. Second, ignoring quicksave. This is a save-scum design whether it admits it or not; the intended loop is probe, die, reload, apply what you learned about where the machine gun nest actually sits. Anyone who calls that cheating will have a miserable time here. Third, never touching Direct Control, which converts unwinnable armour and heavy weapon moments into solvable ones. Internalise those three habits during your first two missions and a game with a reputation for being impenetrable becomes readable within a single evening. That is the honest beginner path, and it is shorter than the difficulty curve suggests. The complaints are legitimate, though. The campaign is short by the standards of the series and leans heavily on systems and assets built for the World War II entries, so the setting occasionally reads as a reskin rather than a rethink. Pathfinding is the oldest joke in this engine, and you will watch a driver reverse into a tree at the decisive moment of a firefight. Friendly AI does not use cover with anything like the discipline the enemy shows. Difficulty spikes arrive without warning, unit selection and the inventory screen fight you constantly, and there is no tutorial worth the name, which for a game this dense in systems is the real sin. A 68 on Metacritic reads fair: excellent foundations, a thin package built on top of them. What keeps it worth owning is everything surrounding the campaign. Co-op runs over Steam and LAN, and splitting these missions with one player on infantry and one on armour is the best version of the game by a distance. PvP and skirmish still function if you can find bodies, though assume you are bringing your own opponent rather than finding a populated lobby. The bundled level editor is the same toolset the community used to keep older entries in this series alive for years, so if you enjoy building scenarios there is a very deep hole to fall into. Come for the simulation and the co-op, not the story, and expect to work for it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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