WW2: Normandy

There is a pleasant trend these days in a number of games being released at a relatively low cost (about $20) instead of the usual $50 - $60 that has become all too common. Most of these games are called 'value releases', and one or two of them has actually been enjoyable in a small sort of way. But for every "Serious Sam", I suppose there will be three or four games like "Normandy WW2".

Who among us hasn't really enjoyed some of the .MOD add-ons for Quake 2 and Half-life? I downloaded all the highly rated ones from Planethalflife.com and Planetquake.com, and enjoyed more than half of them almost as much as I did playing the original games for the same period of time. The problem with "Normandy: WW2" is that it plays worse than most of the Quake 1 MODs I downloaded.

The graphics are impressive in a few small ways, but overall are a failure. The enemy soldiers only have maybe 3 or 4 different skins, and until you get up close, they look almost the same. Actually, when you get up close they look confusingly like zombies. After recently playing the Thief games, I was surprised to see them not get right back up after being shot by mere bullets! Looking more closely at the face of one of the soldiers after I was killed, and the screen froze, there is definitely something undead about their faces that I can't put my finger on. There are also some dead allied soldiers lying face up that you come across periodically, and they look almost more alive!

If you thought the Quake games overused the brown and grey palettes, wait until you see this game. Everything, and I mean everything, looks grey. The buildings, the ground, the sky, and the enemies. This is a problem, but not an unusual way to increase the perceived difficulty, by making all the German soldiers camouflaged against their backgrounds.

The game only consists of ten levels, and some I finished on the first try in less than ten minutes. Others involved lots of quick save and reloads, but since the enemies were mostly static, all I had to do was prepare my machine gun as I darted around the corner where I knew they would be waiting for me. The levels that took me more time was never due to the size of the level, but always due to the amount of enemies in selected areas. For such small levels, I'm surprised they couldn't throw in more than just ten rather easily.

The amateur feel to each level is only enhanced by the poor mission objectives. First off, I don't have a particularly fast computer, yet the 'intro' screens telling you about the mission only stays on the screen for about 6-8 seconds, which isn't enough time for anyone to read. Too add to this, finishing a mission is often a big surprise. Remember in Quake or Half-life how you could almost sense the mission ending as you approached an unusual piece of architecture or a final boss? Nothing like that here. Instead, you just come across an area that looks like any other, and a little text message appears on the screen saying "Mission Complete". One level had me disabling two large guns, and as I ran up to each gun, I lobbed my never used grenades and shot my bazooka at it. Nothing happened. As I got up close to the gun to look for a switch or something, a text message appeared on screen simply saying, "This Gun has been disabled". Unreal Tournament from over eighteen months ago at least showed you the resulting destruction at the end of an assault map! Most amateur MODs enjoyed putting in a little video using the game's engine.

Each level looks pretty much the same, with no new graphics appearing. Two or three actually had a nice layout to them. I particularly liked the third level where you keep coming back to the same open areas, but at different heights. Unfortunately, most of the levels continued that amateur feeling of long, single height, sporadic buildings and open fields. There are areas where you can temporarily be underwater. Humorously, though, you can stay underwater forever!

One level, the sixth, was different and interesting for a little while. Here, reminiscent of another value title "Beach Head 2000", you are trapped in a double sided bunker where waves of soldiers are approaching and shooting at you, and you must take out six tanks as they go by. This is difficult since only your bazooka hurts a tank, and it takes two shots for each one. The first shot does nothing to slow it down, and you have to pick the order of your targets carefully. A disabled tank often blocked my shot of a moving tank behind it. Still, the excitement was ruined after I realized that the enemy soldiers shooting at me, and throwing grenades into my bunker, were from an endless supply, and came from and stood in exactly the same spots over and over. This made it more important to simply avoid them, then kill any of them.

The computer AI is worse than Quake 1. Most enemies are static, and the few that do move tend to come at you in a set path. And they never chased me very far, as if they are regulated to their small areas. Shooting one of two soldiers standing next to each other seldom made the other one even take notice. When you shoot an enemy, they are frozen for a second as they become wounded, usually making it easy to kill a moving soldier as soon as you have clipped him once.

The weapons are a good mixed bag, but you really will never use any but three of the seven. You have a machete, which I never used once, and when I tried to kill an enemy with it, it was clear that it was worthless against any enemy with a gun, even ones you sneak up on from behind. The pistol could be used, but since it has almost no accuracy, except for up close, and the machine gun is so much more effective, why would I ever use it? The rifle will be your main gun for most of the game. Most enemies are seen at a distance, and although not a sniper rifle, shooting an enemy that is only a few pixels in size is no problem. As a matter of fact, there wasn't any location damage at all, meaning that if you could just see part of an arm or leg around the corner, you could do as much damage as hitting the soldier in the head. The machine gun is effective at even medium ranges, and I could have used it for most of the game, but I mistakenly assumed that it would run out of ammo quickly. Only towards the end of the game did I realize I could tear through the final levels using only it. The bazooka is devastating, but only serves to kill tanks since they give you just enough ammo for the number of tanks you are sure to come across. You can drop mines, but why? The enemies never came after me. You also had grenades which worked well, but were much harder to use then either the rifle or machinegun. Although the game advertises realistic weapons, this can't be right, since if I remember "Saving Private Ryan", their rifle clips only held five shots each. Here all the weapons, including the 15 shot pistol, seem to quadruple the amount of ammo needed before reloading is required.

You are also supposed to be getting some support from your ally troops that have landed with you, or that you rescue. What you get instead are dead soldiers, some times with backpacks lying near them. Each level has a certain number of backpacks that heal a certain amount of health, and contain a certain amount of ammo for each weapon. It brought back some fond memories of Doom, but how realistic is that in today's game playing world?

After I finished the game, I looked on the company's web site for information for this Epinion and was surprised to see that a patch was quickly issued. They made the following improvements: location damage, AI has better line of sight, enemies alerted other enemies when they are shot, and the intro levels don't disappear until a key is pressed. What this tells me is that this game was never properly tested before releasing. The patch also included two extra bonus levels, but I had no intention of being suckered into playing them when there are so many better games to occupy my time with.