WW2: Normandy

There was no description on the back of the case, since the installation and tech support information had been put on the back to save on printing costs, so I had to use my imagination to decide just what fantastic adventures this game would allow me to embark upon. The title suggested that the story had to do with World War 2 and/or Normandy, so I theorized that it was a war simulation from the point of view of a soldier during D-Day, which would be an interesting and ambitious idea for a budget game company to pull off. Naturally I was wrong. Turns out it’s an embarrassingly bad first-person shooter from the point of view of a soldier being dropped behind the German lines in Normandy to assist the troops who would storm the beach later that day. This is a difficult and dangerous task that entails walking from room to room and shooting a few people, then doing it about 40,000 more times. In order words it’s exactly like every other FPS in the world, except it’s a whole lot worse because, you know, it’s a Valu-Soft game.

I wish this menu would physically manifest itself just so it could be dragged outside and shot.

My suspicions about the game’s quality deepened when I saw the notice on the title screen that World War 2 Normandy used the Lithtech engine. They only deepened further after I fought my way through the horribly broken menu system and saw my mission assignment, which was to parachute by myself into the middle of a hedge maze and shoot a bunch of German people in the face, an activity that most people would frown upon nowadays. I guess our standards of decency just weren’t as high back then. The mission briefing is followed by a white-knuckled, high-suspense cutscene that consists mostly of a still model of your guy slowly falling with a parachute on while planes fly all around him and tracers whizz by at speeds that occasionally exceed 5 miles per hour. The entire cutscene fades to black before you land (probably because showing the landing might require them to animate the model in some way) and then you are thrust into the wild and wacky world of Normandy.

Dear Lithtech Inc, Please do not let anyone use your game engine ever again. Sincerely, Taylor Bell.

It’s very sad when you can play a war simulation on the Hard setting and kill every enemy in sight simply by pretending you’re playing Quake. But thanks to the fine folks at 3LV, that’s exactly what happened. Ten seconds after I landed I was assaulted by a group of Germans who decided to be jerks and shoot at me. First I started holding down the spacebar and hopping all over the place like a happy little Nazi-slaughtering bunny rabbit. Then I ran out into the open and started circle-strafing around everybody while bouncing quickly enough to cover half a football field with each leap. Being master tacticians, the enemies decided to constantly shoot behind me, just so while I killed them all I’d be pained with the knowledge that if I still had my parachute on and had it trailing behind me, it would be full of bullet holes and wouldn’t work anymore. As a result, I managed to kill every single enemy in the first encounter without even taking a single hit. After doing this I restarted and did the exact same thing again, only this time I did it with the default knife. Yes, the AI is just as bad as it sounds, and although it doesn’t sound good to start with, it sounds even worse once you realize that it actually is as bad as it sounds. It sounds even worse if you paid any attention to that last sentence, which I highly doubt.