Hour of Victory review

All in all, this tired little addition to the game is an outright disaster. Instead of giving you a free-roaming path through a level and objectives that match each soldier’s unique skills, all it really means is that the commando can push things out of the way, the sneaky man can pick locks, and the sniper - being the highly-trained, best-of-the-best, special operative of the three - can climb ropes.

As such, any potentially clever and interesting situations that might arise from you playing as one character rather than the other are immediately cast aside, and the solution simply involves walking round the corner to find a different thing to push, lock to pick or rope to climb in order to progress. From here, things go from bad to worse. We’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade enough times to know that Nazis are pretty damned stupid, but Hour of Victory’s Nazis take the Iron Cross for Stupidest Nazis Ever. They just sort of bob around and occasionally duck behind things, hoping that if they ignore you you’ll go away, and then acting all shocked when you saunter up to them and clobber them round the chops with your rifle.

Speaking of which, the code that works out whether you’re close enough to a baddy to clobber them instead of shooting is completely broken. As such, the two of you can be on opposite sides of a crate, and, while he’s shooting you in the face with his machine gun, you’re forced to stand there wildly swinging your arms in an attempt to knock him out, even though you’re fully six feet away. In fact, the whole thing is pretty buggy. Tanks disappear inches from your astonished face, guns hang about in mid-air and NPCs shout “Follow me!” before sprinting merrily into the nearest wall, looking perplexed and then disappearing from view entirely.

Frankly, Hour of Victory is out-and-out the worst shooter we’ve played in years. For all its Xbox-isms and trendy bloom effects it never really feels much of a step up from Return to Castle Wolfenstein in terms of visuals, and the original Wolfenstein 3D in terms of gameplay.

The game has an impossibly horrible and staggered plot that makes no sense whatsoever and ties none of the missions together at all. The ‘heroes’ are all bitterly unlikable pricks. The gameplay is tattered, broken and excruciatingly boring. In fact, there are just too many horrible things going on in Hour of Victory to sum up in a single article. Put succinctly: the mere thought of booting up Hour of Victory ever again is making our balls hurt.

Mar 13, 2008