Man of war assault squad ign manual#

So when you do win a scenario, you get a great flush of accomplishment found more often in cerebral wargames than in blow-'em-up RTS affairs. For instance, Nazis might send armored cars on suicide missions that roll over mortars to destroy them before being blown apart by the SAS. Enemy forces are ruthless and not above resorting to desperate measures in desperate situations. Some of the moves that the enemy can pull off are nothing short of astounding. While you have to take a few moments to think about your next steps, you can't spend too much time sitting around because aggressive enemy forces quickly zero in on your location and obliterate it. Vehicles can be repaired, enemies can be looted for hardware, buildings can be occupied for firing positions or destroyed to clear a shooting angle, and so on. The sheer variety of units that you can deploy, along with the amazingly detailed layout of the destructible maps, means that every enemy position can be taken out in almost limitless ways. You aren't locked into solitary solutions, however. Do this smartly and keep one move ahead of the bad guys with flanking maneuvers, and you just might live long enough to get a Dear John letter from back home.īattles play out a bit like addictive rock-paper-scissors puzzles where you're always searching for the right tactics to use in the right situations. It's easy to duck and cover, too, because the interface automatically shows you ghost positions of troops behind the selected terrain before you issue any orders. Using every scrap of scrub, broken wall, and flaming half-track for cover is crucial to keep your lads alive and fighting for God and country. So you have to use all of your resources, switching from basic infantry to antitank specialists to tanks to mortars to snipers to elite nation-specific units like the Rangers and the Red Guards as the occasion fits. You cannot win battles in Assault Squad by simply band-selecting a bunch of tanks or troops and hurling them at the enemy lines while the generic RTS martial music stomps away in the background and your soldiers holler battle cries like 'That one's for Uncle Sam!' While you might roll Stuarts over the odd little guy, opposing infantry comes with antitank grenades and rocket launchers that can shred your supposedly mighty armor columns in mere moments. The latter is Men of War at its best, since you wage joint warfare that emphasizes the combined-arms teamwork design of the entire game.Īnd the game doesn't pull any punches with its combined-arms focus. There are three versus battle modes pitting as many as 16 players against one another on massive maps, along with a new cooperative mode where you work together with up to three friends on missions against the AI. Settings range from wartorn France in the wake of the Normandy invasion, to the bleached-out deserts of North Africa, to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Skirmish features 15 huge one-off scenarios where you lead the troops of the USA, Commonwealth, Soviet Union, Germany, or Japan against their respective enemies. There are no bases to build or resources to manage other than the points needed for reinforcements. If you capture flag-bedecked strategic points on the battlefields, you're rewarded with unit points that you can use to order up new troops, tanks, mortars, and naval bombardments.Īnd that's pretty much it. Scenarios are tackled by starting at the south end of the map and blitzkrieging your way to the north, blowing apart progressively tougher enemy troop emplacements and fortifications as you go.

Man of war assault squad ign manual#

The structure of the game is simple, and the interface is so intuitive that you don't need to refer to the manual or go through a tutorial (which you don't get anyway). The basics of Assault Squad fit in with the likes of its WWII real-time strategy predecessors. If you're up for a grueling yet satisfying slog through Tom Brokaw's war, this is a great way to kill some more Nazis on your nights off.Įven though battles play out a little like battlefield games of chess, you still get to blow things up on a regular basis. In other words, you really have to know what you're doing to avoid the fate of having your name carved on a cenotaph back home in 1945. Like the original Men of War that became a cult hit in 2009, this take-no-prisoners sequel boasts a rigorous attention to realism geared toward confounding tank rushers with no understanding of combined-arms tactics. This tactical real-time game from Digitalmindsoft is something of a crueler version of similar games such as Company of Heroes and Codename: Panzers. Serious challenge is what Men of War: Assault Squad is all about.