Faces of War is a squad-based real-time strategy game that pits you in with some of the telling stories of the Second World War, playing as soldiers from the Allies, Germany and the Soviets in three separate campaigns. A game that spreads across Europe, and eventually finishes in Berlin, it’s surprising that it lacks in the excitement department. The missions that are featured are unbelievably boring and uninspiring, lacking the sort of intensity you could expect from such historic battles. The story fells quite scripted, as things will only appear once you’ve progressed to a certain point in the game’s mission. The backlash of this is that each mission progresses in a linear fashion, where there is absolutely no freedom to fulfill other objectives if you please.
The gameplay options implemented in the game are terribly undercooked, in the sense the game often shows glimpses of hope, however with the majority of them feeling unfinished. You will often only have direct control over one or two squads during some of the most telling battles. Whilst there are other computer-controlled allies spread throughout battles, it is often up to you to use a squad of six-or-so members to achieve some unrealistic goals. You are often faced with a number of situations where you must destroy hundreds of soldiers and tanks with just a small group of men. Your men have the ability to wipe out tanks quite easily with a single grenade, and hordes of men with some rifles. It makes the game feel a tad overpowering and unrealistic, considering you’re only ever given the opportunity to control a limited amount of units and not the entire army.
In Russia, War plays you.
The game features an option where players can take direct control of individual units. You are able to press the Crtl key that’ll allow you move, aim and shoot with any soldier, giving the game a bit more of a first-person shooter feel to it. At any rate, it’s a feature that can be often overlooked as it’s usually quite troublesome to use during the midst of an intense battle – fiddling around with controls doesn’t appear as the safest option, to tell you the truth. Not to mention that the interface already has options that allow you to order units within your squad to fire their rocket launchers at tanks or sniper rifles, eliminating pretty much all purpose behind this feature.
Faces of War drops in significant appeal due to its unpredictable AI. It’s fulfilling to watch your units hide behind cover and often use their best vantage point to shoot at enemies, but the majority of the time units will run in front of enemy crossfire, drop to a crawl or position themselves poorly despite instructing them to retreat from battle to avoid death. Your units will often get stuck on invisible walls in virtually all of the game’s missions, proving to be a real issue in providing any sort of flow to the game. Your units will usually die due to the game’s poor AI rather than your inability to use strategy. In fact, there’s really not a great deal of strategy involved with Faces of War. There’s not a lot of flanking out enemies, since you very rarely have the ability to control more than one squad.
Another telling exclusion that adds to the game’s downfall is the lack of any longevity. Despite spreading across three different campaigns, the feel of the missions are virtually the same but with different locations and different names for guns that shoot the exact same way. To add to this, Faces of War sorely lacks a skirmish mode, or a mode that can be exploded after finishing the campaign mode. The multiplayer doesn’t stack up that well either, due to a lacking in community and poor performance issues. The modes in multiplayer do however add some appeal, such as the co-op modes and intriguing Chicken Hunt modes.
Crash and burn, much like this game.
Probably the only real plus side to the game’s gameplay is the variety of options at hand. You can order your units to issue out some suppressive fire on areas, you can order units to throw grenades at areas and even order them to pick-up weapons and ammo off dead bodies. All of this usually works out quite well, since if there’s a tank near by you can press the rocket launcher button and a unit will run out and hit that tank without any further instruction – similarly with ordering a sniper to take out a machine gunner.
Visually, things look surprisingly well in Faces of War. The physics and graphics are usually quite impressive, with almost everything being fully destructible. Buildings will fall when tank fire hits, gravel will crumble as tanks roll over it and all sorts of smoke and fire effects that usually look quite impressive during some of the more exciting battles. The game does lack a bit of detail though. Some of the textures often look a tad blurred and there’s absolutely no finer details on units, things look especially terrible when zooming in on them. Audio is usually poorly cued and the game is mismatched with some below average voice acting. There’s never really any indication of incoming explosions or grenades, ruining any sort of immersion you'd expect from a real war.
There’s probably no easier way to say this, but Faces of War is incredibly average. Despite the inclusion of some fascinating and exciting gameplay options, the game fails to execute the important factors when trying to make a rewarding and enjoyable World War RTS. The game is incredibly dull, the AI eventually gets on your nerves and there’s absolutely nothing that draws you into the action of -- what is suppose to be -- an intense re-telling of a horrific war.
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