If you’re developing a World War II shooter you need a hook if your game is to survive in such an overcrowded genre. Hour of Victory's hook is to let you choose from three different characters for each mission. Your choices are Ross, Taggert and Bull. Ross is a tough man, Bull is a gun with a sniper, and Taggert is a soldier who can perform stealth kills. At the beginning of a mission, you’ll be allowed to choose which character you want to play through the level with; it actually makes just about no difference which character you select, as the unique actions you can perform with each character are rarely of any value.
The storyline for Hour of Victory is basic. Essentially, the allies have discovered that the Germans are attempting to develop an atomic weapon. Obviously, this would be a massive advantage for Jerry, and so you’ll need to seek out information regarding the weapon and win the war before the Germans can use the technology. The storyline isn’t very well told though, so the basic premise for every other World War II shooter stays true: defeat the Nazis and do it quick.
It’s not all sounding too bad right now, is it? Well, the set-up's okay, and choosing who you play as is a fair, albeit recycled, idea. But as with most terrible games, it’s the gameplay which completely destroys Hour of Victory. This feels like it was submitted for play-testing on a day when the testers were on strike. It’s normal for a game to have a few glitches, but if we hadn’t been playing a retail copy of the game we could easily mistake our copy as unfinished preview code.
Just keep going straight, then straight.
Where to begin? The AI is poor, and at times, downright confusing. It’s quite common for you to completely clear part of the battlefield, turn around, and then turn back to find an enemy soldier just standing there, waiting to be offed. We can believe that the Germans may possibly have been developing an atomic bomb, but we don’t quick think they would have mastered the invisibility cloak all those years ago. The AI doesn’t just appear in front of you though; they’ll walk straight into a firefight and shoot their own allies. The problems are so prevalent it’s enough to have you laughing, then crying at the fact you’re playing such a poor title. Your own team-mates are no better though, sometimes shooting blankly into walls.
It’s not just the AI that’s the problem though. There are several glitches in the game that will have you wanting your hour back. At times, the game will lock up for absolutely no apparent reason. The solution? Restart the console. We encountered frequent clipping issues, and it’s surprising just how often enemies can become stuck on the environment.
Even ignoring the glitches and the poor AI still leaves a horrendously rushed game. It’s easy to feel claustrophobic in Hour of Victory, simply because the levels are so linear, uninspired and small. If you’ve played any World War II shooter from the past five years, you’ll know what to expect: destroyed homes, empty barrels and plenty of barricades to crouch against. Even though the AI isn’t particularly working overtime, Hour of Victory still possesses a frame-rate that staggers far too often.
So in terms of gameplay, what we have with Hour of Victory is a rushed game with a poor frame-rate, dodgy AI, terrible, linear level design and an abundance of glitches. The game feels beyond broken, and the fact it’s even been released onto store shelves is a war crime in itself.
We yawn so you don't have to.
Hour of Victory features a multiplayer mode that’s nowhere near as good as it needs to be to make us forget about the single-player campaign. There are three modes: Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Devastation. Thankfully you won’t encounter poor AI here, but it’s highly likely you won’t encounter anyone at all. We had trouble finding people to play against, and in a few weeks we feel that the lobbies in Hour of Victory will be abandoned.
Hour of Victory was developed using Unreal 3.0. A positive point for the game? No. We’ve seen what the Unreal 3.0 Engine is capable of, and it’s capable of far more than what's on display in Hour of Victory. Lazily assembled soldier models have been reused, so all of the soldiers look remarkably similar to each other. The levels are poorly designed and bland, and graphically Hour of Victory looks very average; the Xbox 360 is capable of much, much more. Audio-wise, the soundtrack is epic, but the voices of your squad become repetitive about ten minutes into the game. If you’re heading towards a location, you’ll sometimes hear the same directions shouted at you some ten times before you actually get there.
Hour of Victory's single-player campaign only lasts for about five hours. The game’s levels are short, and as the game practically shows you on the HUD where all of your enemies are, you’re never likely to feel challenged throughout the game. As mentioned, the multiplayer lobbies are sparse already, and with titles like Call of Duty 3 on the Xbox 360, we can see this game becoming a multiplayer favourite for about as long as its title implies. The Achievements are simple enough to attain though, for those who want further punishment.
Hour of Victory is a poor game that's simply impossible to recommend to anyone. The fact that a game can actually be so poor, so glitchy, and so ridiculously generic and boring is a surprise. Hour of Victory is one of the worst World War II shooters ever, and a game with absolutely no redeeming features.
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