During our play-through of the game, we got to play several missions from the game’s three available stories. The first thing that hits you is that Faces of War offers a great deal of variety between each story. With the Germans you’ll begin by fighting off the British in abandoned cities and eventually finding yourself fighting in the frosty conditions of Leuven. With so much diversity, gamers can expect to have various missions to accomplish along the way too. For instance, you’ll be required to capture enemy territories, place explosives on bridges, secure hostages and even destroy anti-tank weapons. And more often than not, most of that will be nicely wrapped into one single mission, meaning that most missions will be one long and strategic fight in themselves.
Ka-boom!
Despite being labelled as an RTS, Faces of War plays quite differently from anything else in the genre. Stripped of any sort of base building or resource gathering, the game focuses on the importance of squad management and your ability to command your units in tight situations. To help you with this, Faces of War allows you to take control of a small squad of units that can move independently from the core army. Helping this gameplay structure is the unbelievably solid AI of your own units as well as the rest of your army. You will be able to command your units to run to certain positions, but it’s up to them when they decide to crouch or run, and they'll do so depending on their surroundings and whether or not they’re under fire. They’ll use their cover effectively, and peek out every now and then to lay out a few shots.
The excellent AI is what makes Faces of War so much more appealing than any other game with a similar formula. Units will always act effectively on their own, diving for cover and searching for the perfect vantage point as often as possible, and enemy AI will be just as aggressive. They’ll constantly move around to avoid fire, use grenades and even use their cover just as well as you.
Faces of War plays a lot like Brothers in Arms, minus the first-person perspective, of course. You'll be constantly issuing out orders for your squad to duck behind cover and to fire on your enemy. It’s surprising how responsive it is, which makes Faces of War play much like any other World War first-person shooter, but with a lot more flexibility with what you can do with your own units. You’ll often have various specialised units in your squad that can use bazookas and sniper rifles. While you can issue your whole squad to fire on an enemy, and have these specialised units use their weapons by themselves, you can also decide for yourself who they will individually target. If there’s an annoying German manning that machine gun, you can take control of your sniper in order to take out the machine gunner alone. You can also give your units orders to dish out some suppression fire, climb things and even take control of vehicles or machine guns.
Hey! This really does look good.
Visually, Faces of War looks simply impressive. Packed with marvellous explosions, superb environmental detail and some great lighting, the game looks like a beast on a high-end PC. And the sound is just as good, making the war atmosphere really come alive.
With many developers now opting for strategy over typical RTS fundamentals, it’s important that such games can impress with a steady consistency of AI, and thankfully Faces of War does this exceptionally well throughout the entire game, as well as maintaining an appealing gameplay structure. While this will be filed as the one millionth World War game made within the last couple years, Faces of War comes as a very refreshing change for the War theme and the RTS genre.
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