When we play games set during WW2, you could argue we’re actually revisiting the silver-screen version, albeit in interactive form. Nearly every shooter seems to tip its hat to Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers or Enemy at the Gates along its way to the credits screen.
What we’ve assembled below is a list of different perspectives on the conflict as we’ve seen it in movies and TV in the intervening decades. Perspectives that place you in the boots of an infantryman, a general, or more often than not, an incredibly tough super-soldier capable of turning the tide — if not wrapping the whole thing up — —single-handedly.
We’re starting this list by paying our dues. 1999’s Medal of Honor came about after Steven Spielberg watched his son playing Goldener on his N64. With World War 2 firmly in the director’s head during the production of Saving Private Ryan, he set his Dream works Interactive Studio the task of creating one of those newfangled first-person shooters set in the conflict, and in doing so laid a template for the subgenre for decades to come.
With a score by Academy Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino and consultation from Saving Private Ryan military advisor Dale Dye, it’s a staunchly cinematic slant on the war, and that’s important. The bombast and set-pieces throughout its campaign aren’t just exhilarating for the player, they also make clear the distinction between the fictionalized war we know from the big screen, and the real events we wisely keep at a respectful distance. As for its legacy, if you ever wondered why you seemed to spend 1999 to 2005 landing on various occupied beaches in shooters, look no further. Not the most immersive or playable of the list today, Medal of Honor nonetheless deserves its mention for creating a template for interactive war experiences.
Relic’s take on the traditional RTS ditches the vast numbers of units and resource management operations so that you can focus on a small group of potent but fragile soldiers. The settings are vast and frenetic, so there’s still that key sense of a wider scale battle, but in Company of Heroes you’re micromanaging units so closely that you feel both ownership over your victories and horrible cold-sweat accountability for your losses.
The simplicity of taking capture points to increase your manpower gives a sense of pace to battles that’s often missing in military strategy, and some ebb and flow rather than a slow but inevitable creep across the map. Its cutscenes are serviceable as tone setters, but like the very best RTS games, it tells a compelling story through the missions themselves.
The German SS Paranormal Division releases a powerful curse at an Egyptian dig site and subsequently harnesses the power of zombies to help in the war effort — at least until one turkey-guzzling soldier single-handedly disables the remote medieval castle where the reanimation experiments are taking place, saves his captured OSA chum, and assassinates the officers in charge of the whole division.
We’ve consulted the history books, and we’re pretty sure none of this happened. It’s perhaps a stretch to call this a World War 2 game, but Wallenstein has always combined elements of the real war with supernatural lore to great effect. The ID Tech 3-powered visuals wowed us with what we considered photo realism by 2001 standards, but the pace, variation and environmental integration of the combat still holds up magnificently today.
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