World War II Combat: Road to Berlin

The Good
The trivia segments are interesting, but you could easily look them up on dedicated encyclopedias, your college class, or maybe your best friend who happens to be a history nut.

The Bad
Hoo boy, where do I start with this...to begin with, the game itself is rushed, and I do mean rushed! WWII Combat game runs on a heavily modified Unreal 2 engine that powers Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, and even has the same devs. Many particle effects and so forth are plastered without shame, alongside some new ones (including barely noticeable blood effects). Problem is, Shadow Ops had more time put into it.

The graphics are a chunky, blocky, pixelized garblemesh. Textures look like carpets and patches of grass instead of actual metal, brick, dirt, wood, ash, whatever. Weapon and character models are just the same, chunky and blocky. The BAR looks like someone decided to make a gun out of pipes and blocks of wood, and the ever-present Nazi goons you'll shoot up have the same repeating models over and over again. Animations work, I guess, but they're cartoonish to look at.

The controls are dreadful. They slip, slide, and hardly even work at times. They're also poorly mapped out; and make you wonder if it was intended for a FPS game in the first place.

The biggest issue? Bugs. Rushed is the name of the game here, and bugs are littered everywhere, in the levels, objectives, weapons and AI. The AI lacks any real depth, and even your own allies will decide to shoot at you. Apparently the game was so bad, it's enough to make these G.Is go bananas. Shooting them means game over, apparently, but I never faced that. One other major issue, thanks to bugs and rushed development, is the lack of a proper health system. You better be smart and hope that your pasty butt doesn't get riddled with bullets, instead of the ever convinent health pack to fall back on. This makes for frustrating gameplay, and with a terrible checkpoint system in place? You just got a recipe for digital disaster!

Audio wise, it's awful. The music, sounds and voice acting could've been done by Fred Newman. Y'know, the composer from Doug? He'd do a better job with sounds and voices than whatever the devs pushed out here.

Multiplayer works...somewhat. I can't imagine anyone playing this online, but what's really funny? The bots carry over the same basic, buggy AI from the campaign. Just goes to show that rushed is used everywhere in this case - plural, verb, synonym, whatever.

The Bottom Line
I'm a fairly open-minded person, and there are games I think that, while not amazing or the absolute pinnacle of art, don't necessarily deserve extreme bouts of distaste. Games like Bad Boys: Miami Takedown, Aliens Colonial Marines and so forth, while poorly done, they're games where you're supposed to leave your brain at the door, and retrieve it when you're done afterwards. They're simply dumb fun, to put it one way.

WWII Combat, suffice to say, has none of that dumb fun factor, and I easily squeeze it into my worst games of all time, right somewhere in between Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse and 25 To Life. I have yet to play the sequel, Road to Iwo Jima, but after playing this, I'm going to expect worse out of it. Ah well, I'm pretty sure the sequel will induce more psychological wounds that'll never heal. Thank goodness 2 games were made, eh?

The Good
Still looking; this game sucks. Actually, it can be considered a plus that the game is so horrible, it's funny.

The Bad
Well, just about everything else. I mean, I know that this is a budget title, but that's still no excuse for the very poor quality of this game. Let's see here...we've got a laundry list of serious technical and gameplay problems...

WWII Combat: Road To Berlin obviously wasn't finished when it came out (despite some delays), which is made obvious by the fact that the game is chock-full of bugs. The animations for characters are awful, given the fact that they look like cardboard targets sliding on ice. The controls are so unresponsive that you'll think you spilled some soda on your controller. The graphics and level designs are truly among the very worst on the Xbox; all of the textures and models look very chunky and blocky, and the polygon count is extremely low, despite the fact that this game uses the Unreal 2 engine. The sound effects are every bit as horrible as the graphics, with a god-awful musical score that sounds like it was taken from a movie released in the 1920's, terrible voice acting, and unsatisfying weapon sounds that all sound the same for each gun. The threat reticule is also totally broken, since it always reports random results no matter where you're getting shot from. And the AI? Axis and Allied soldiers don't use any kind of strategy to take down the enemy or achieve mission objectives, but it also seems that the developers didn't do anything to differentiate Axis AI from Allied AI. The Allied soldiers will shoot at you instead of the Axis, as if they were on the Axis side, too. But killing an Allied soldier means Game Over, making the game nearly unplayable. Thankfully, most of the game is spent fighting Axis by yourself rather than with allies.

WWII Combat: Road to Berlin is made even more frustrating by design flaws that prove that the game was put together at the very last minute. The guns have all sorts of problems that make them no fun to use. The pistol feels terribly weak, the machine guns are pathetically inaccurate, and all weapons suffer from sluggish firing rates and reloading times -- even the heavy machine gun seems like it fires at only two bullets per second. You can't pick up any medkits during a level; your health only recharges at the end of each level, which proves to be frustrating because the game is very difficult. You can't pick up any weapons from fallen enemies; you can only pick up their ammo, which also proves to be frustrating as you only start the level with the pistol and another weapon, which is either a machine gun or sniper rifle. If this gun happens to be a sniper rifle, then you are stuck only using the pistol for close combat. Ugh. You also only have one save slot per profile, and you can't save manually (the game uses a checkpoint save system).

The Bottom Line
Please, don't play this garbage. Almost everything else on the market is vastly better than this unplayable pile of crap.