http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/07 ... ult-squad/

No campaign mode? That seems an odd choice.

I must say, this is my most anticipated game of the year.

?

No no. Definitely no jade whatsoever in that statement I assure you. I genuinely loved the previous versions.

Hey Derf

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08 ... open-beta/

I don't think they'll ever get 10k people but wtf does it matter eh? Just sign up to the steam group, who knows...

Yeah did that already

Haha well I should have figured.

Open beta is here!!

http://www.digitalmindsoft.eu/games/men ... /open-beta

I'm gonna be busy most nights the coming days, but weekend is ON!

Installed it.

It's only MP, so i guess if we wanna play we gotta sync up.

Fo sho. A proposed date for this weekend just fell through so I should be available for most of it. Let's just hope the engine doesn't mess as much with my graphics card as the origional MoW's engine did. If it does...I'm probably due a new card anyway soon.

My availability may be not so good this weekend.

Mm crap. I'm out tonight (footy) but maybe Friday? If not, eh, we'll see.

Had a little peep at this game and figured out you can actually play SP. Pretty orgasmic stuff, even though I only had a quick 10 minute session.

I picked a skirmish mission, some kind of area control map whereby the more areas you control, the more resource you get to spend for your reinforcements. Similar to Company Of Heroes. The mechanic actually works quite well.

It was a beach assault map where you start off in control of the small beach, which immediately beyond is a village with streets and houses. You start with 8 men, but of course you can get reinforcements if you like. I didn't notice that I could at that point, so I did what I always do in the first few minutes of any MoW game:

- Acquaint myself with the men, open up their inventories, see what they got, take note of their names (Brooks, Ramirez, Patterson, etc).
- Have a quick look at the enemy locations on the map and determine if I need to setup a defense, (they looked fairly harmless, so I didn't).
- Split the guys into 4-man teams (the Derf staple infantry unit).
- Go off and Reccy the enemy position

I decided to go have a look at the left flank in detail, but the way the houses and stuff was arranged, there was no way I was gonna be able to get in close and put down a lot of firepower. Not with just 8 guys with rifles anyway. It was pretty cool that my men started getting engaged from pretty far out, and returned fire accordingly on their own. In the previous MoW, the engagement distance never began this far out. Another tick in the Derf-book-of-approval.

So i frantically tried to suppress them, but at that distance it wasn't going to happen. It wasn't worth risking some lucky stray german bullet to one of my dudes skull, so I pulled them all back fast to the trenches at the beach. Then i noticed the reinforcement thing. I thought to myself, "i could use a couple of mortars to even the odds" and so I called in 2 mortars from the landing ship. Sweet. I lined them up behind a house, moved my men up to give them some reassurance and started popping away at distance with the mortar rounds, making good kills too (the germans didn't have great cover at all).

Just as I was about to move in to take that flag, I noticed the enemy counterattacked down the middle of the map against my non-controlled (map default) infantry at the beach. They held, but only cos they had a couple of machine guns and what looked like a quad-fifty AA. I thought to myself "maybe they have more resources that me cos they have more flags". So I called for additional reinforcements for the defensive purposes. What's cool is that infantry come equipped with a shovel, which they can use to make little sandbag walls. I was planning to setup a monster defense.

But then as I was dicking around with reinforcements and general pokey-feely-Reccy at the same time, the germans rolled up with an armoured car. Shit. I guess I REALLY should have called in those small AT guns before the flamethrower unit (which would have helped a treat with attacking buildings). The armoured car is weak, but has a 40mm gun so it can happily bash your infantry from afar, especially if you don't have any AT grenades or kamikaze soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the motherland... er I mean, for freedom (I have to remember I was playing as the yanks, not mighty USSR).

So at that point I was humbled and decided to savour the game for either a coop session or the real deal. As it's a Beta, the framerate was a tiny bit choppy, and perhaps the controls were not fully polished yet, but otherwise this is an insta-buy for me definitely. Probably even a / 5, just like the previous MoW.

If I were to replay this mission, I would definitely get some AT guns down quick, followed by infantry, sandbags and then mortars. By that stage, I bet the enemy would have made the prospect of attacking very difficult for me. I image there would have been ALOT of units on the map and ALOT of carnage and sacrifice to capture those flags and attempt to fend off counter-attacks.

Man if this shit was turn based, it would be an instant / 5 for sure. I don't mind the micromanagement since if things get bad, you can pause (in SP) but the only thing i'm worried about is the losses during the chaos and losses in rash "now-or-never" charges. Sure, maybe that's the beauty of the game, but i'd hate to see Patterson, Brooks and Ramirez get blown to bits.

Frankly I think even the Skirmishes are designed for coop play (2-4 players). I just retried the mission on my own and got overrun. It's fun as hell but impossible to micromanage on your own. Well, this map on Normal anyway.