The player is given a counter and some menu tabs at the right hand side of the user interface (UI) such UI elements would be quite familiar to veterans of the previous Men of War games. It is in the best interest of any player to keep this in mind – including players that prefer to handle a finite group of soldiers, like they had in the story campaigns of previous Men of War games. The system of requisitioning reinforcements is the most important aspect of the gameplay. With that said, the single-player mode in Assault Squad is definitely not for fans of the series that preferred its campaigns.

Such a system may seem all-too-familiar to veterans of the multiplayer experiences of the Men of War titles. Keeping itself more in line with present-day interpretations of this system, these strategic points are needed by the player in order to obtain the “resources” that are necessary to requisition reinforcements. It is a system that generally worked, and Assault Squad fortunately does not break it. Anyway, as to be expected of such a system, the player must capture and hold these points in order to win.

Within any skirmish map, there are a handful of strategic points that the player needs to capture this is a feature that had long been in real-time strategy titles with World War II settings, the earliest example being Close Combat. Considerable pre-set enemy defences necessitate a gradual approach to beating any skirmish scenario. The maps may have the name of important locales in the history of World War II, but this is just a cosmetic design. These facsimiles take on the form of maps that have the player starting out with only small portions of them under his/her control, and he/she will have to take the rest from whoever the enemy is. Instead, the player plays facsimiles of important events in World War II. Unlike the previous Men of War titles, Assault Squad does not have any story-based campaign to play through. Instead, the player will have to be a lot more cavalier than he/she had been when playing Men of War’s story campaigns. No more will the player shepherd a plucky group of soldiers that do whatever they can to hold back the powerful enemy.

However, where Red Tide focused on telling the stories of the exploits of soldiers that made a difference in World War II, Assault Squad is practically a primer for the next evolution in the series’ unforgiving multiplayer. It also happens to be made by a developer that reiterates and recycles over and over, so it is not a surprise that there would be another so-called stand-alone expansion for Men of War after Red Tide, and then another, this time named “Assault Squad”. The original Men of War was a terrifically complex game that surprised some followers of the computer platform with its sophistication. By Gelugon_baat | Review Date: February 12, 2014

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