This sequel simply places its feet in the same shoes and tries to stumble a bit further through the Eastern Front snow decals.

Assault Squad itself was an attempt to push the series in a direction that coped better with multiplayer, by making the entire thing more skirmished-led, with lashings of co-op, and providing a number of game modes more suited to multiplayer than the original campaign. While the series has made some advancements here and there, with new things to destroy, bigger maps, a better editor, and some engine improvements, it has never really taken a big step from the technology or the template of that first game. The same features - including glorious direct control - remain unaltered. MOWAS2 is little different from its predecessors in this regard. Its fair to say that this hasn't changed much since the first game in the Men Of War series. The Men Of War games are overblown, teetering on the brink of collapse from all the mayhem they try to cram into their khaki knapsacks. Everything has its own stats, its own AI, it's own goddamned damage models and individual inventories. This is no carefully wrought game of soldiers like Company Of Heroes, no, it is instead a barbed-wire-filled no man's land of off-screen dice and destructible scenery that lies between the RTS and a full blown simulation. It is more about the joy of tank damage models than it is about fairness, or even realism. Unlike most finely tuned and well-poised RTS games, these games are more about the action than the balance of play. It is a complex, messy thing, and like war itself it is mostly about sending tiny men to their deaths to test whether doing that will win the battle. If you don't, then your life has a hole in it, a big hole that can only be filled by the exploding battlefields of this lurching World War II-themed monstrosity. You should know about the Men Of War games. All my metaphors seem to have become sticky from neglect. I'm sorry, it's been a while since I wrote anything. Many games have attempted to sell us the idea of War, and even more the idea of Men, but it is only in Men Of War that these two ideas fused together, like desperate lovers, to produce a simulationist battlefield mutant that looks at us with terrible eyes and says: 'Aim is in the reach zone!' The series is flawed, even occasionally lame, but always so beautiful to my eye.

I'll admit that I'm a bit in love with the Men Of War games.

Full release is scheduled for the 20th of March. Men Of War: Assault Squad 2, or MOWASTWO for short, is now available to those who buy into the ongoing beta.

Skirmish men at war assault squad 2