Men of War: Vietnam Special Edition

My first hour with Men of War: Vietnam ended with four dead Soviet advisors, a burning convoy, and a Huey gunship that seemed personally offended by my existence. That introduction tells you everything you need to know about whether this game is for you. There is no tutorial, no warm-up mission, no concession to newcomers. The opening scene drops you into a North Vietnamese convoy seconds before it is incinerated from the air, and if you cannot scatter your surviving four soldiers into the jungle cover before the chopper swings back around, you restart from nothing. The difficulty is not a setting you adjust, it is the product. What Vietnam does well sits underneath all that punishment. The core Men of War formula, no base-building, no resource income, pure small-unit tactics with per-soldier inventory management, is one of the more demanding decision systems in the RTS genre. Each soldier carries a specific loadout: silenced SMGs, sniper rifles, M60s, RPGs. You can loot weapons and ammunition from enemy corpses and caches, and the series' signature direct-control mode lets you slot into any individual soldier and aim, move, and fire manually. Losing your sniper is not an inconvenience; it can functionally end a mission. That weight to every decision is exactly what strategy fans who have grown bored of base-race RTSs are looking for. The two campaigns, one following Russian military advisors embedded with North Vietnamese forces, the other an American special ops team led by Sergeant Merrill, give you ten large maps total, five per side, each of which can run several hours on a first attempt. The dual-perspective structure is genuinely interesting on paper, and the mission-end historical summaries add some context to the chaos, even if the script and voice acting are poor enough to be distracting, particularly in the communist campaign where the accents tip into parody. The jungle setting, which should be Vietnam's strongest card, is also its biggest liability. Dense foliage is modeled as functional cover, you can stage hit-and-run raids from the treeline, blitz a position, and fade back into the green, but the same canopy that hides your enemies also swallows your own units entirely. Camera controls compound the problem; the angle fights you constantly, and fast-moving firefights can have your squad cut down before you get a clean view of what is happening. AI behaviour is inconsistent: units sometimes ignore enemies in point-blank range, and stealth-oriented missions suffer most because the engine was never built around quiet infiltration. Co-op with up to four players across the full campaign is available and genuinely improves the experience by letting each player focus on a subset of units instead of micromanaging the whole squad simultaneously. If you have a friend who also enjoys this kind of masochistic tactical puzzling, co-op is clearly the intended mode. The Special Edition includes the level editor and mod support, which matters because the community has produced content that extends the game's limited ten-mission count. At launch, the editor was absent and it drew real anger from the mod-oriented playerbase, the Special Edition corrects that, and it is the version worth owning if you are going to own either. The mixed Steam score (64% positive) reflects an audience split almost exactly down the middle between series veterans who expected a tough standalone entry and got one, and newcomers or Assault Squad fans who found the scale-down to small guerrilla squads less satisfying than the larger battles of the previous game. If you have never played a Men of War title, starting here is a serious mistake. Play the original Men of War first. Vietnam is a lateral step in the series that assumes competence, not one that builds it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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