Gameplay
Ok, this being an expansion pack, you’d expect a lot of things to be the same and the front end is no different, even the theme tune is the same. This is no bad thing as I personally love that stirring music anyway, plus I’m a big advocate of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, so they’ve left it well alone.
Gray Matter have very sensibly omitted any training levels as you’re sure to have played them in CoD, so there’s no point adding them in here. Why bother padding the game out with a couple of levels to show you what you already know? No, we leap straight into the action here at Bastogne, focus of the famous Battle of the Bulge, where American paratroopers were temporarily surrounded by German troops for 8 days before being relieved.
Right from the off, the action is frantic and intense. You leap from foxhole to foxhole while shells drop all around you, bullets whizzing over head and ricochets pinging all over the place. Once again, a star on your compass marks your objective, but this time around, the penalty for not getting there or going ‘off mission’ is much harsher. In CoD, with a few exceptions, you could run around the level pretty much as you wanted. So if you got lost in the forest, or decided to snipe rather than attack, it didn’t matter all that much. With UO it’s a bit different. This time around, you have to get things done to be able to progress and sometimes you’re on a pretty strict time limit too. For example, in the first level you have to get to a machine gun post, set it up and lay down suppressing fire. If you decide to do this from somewhere other than your foxhole, you’ll fail the mission as you don’t have enough time to set the gun up before you’re over-run by German troops.
Hang on, did I say set the gun up? Yep, I surely did. One of the great innovations that Gray Matter have added is the ability to lift up most machine gun posts and set them up wherever you want. Fancy laying down a withering field of fire across a road? No problem, just find a handy bit of shelter, set up the .30 cal and let rip. How about wanting to cover your retreat after blowing a bunker? Easy, just drop the gun in this corridor, then come back and open up with it as you leg it out later.
This is a superb addition to the game and one that has been well thought through and implemented. Though it doesn’t add much in the way you actually play the game, it does answer those niggles from CoD of wanting to be able to cover a different area with machine gun fire, but not having a gun to do it with. Now before you go off thinking you can run around the level blasting everything in sight, there’s a snag. You can’t fire the gun while carrying it, you have to pause, find something to set the gun up on and then fold out the legs and load it up. The process of setting the gun up leaves you exposed and unable to defend yourself, which nicely balances out against the massive damage you can do once you’ve got the gun up and running. It also forces you to pick your spot carefully. You have to make sure you can cover all approaches otherwise you’ll find yourself being shot in the back. So you see, it adds a slight tactical element to the whole thing, not much, but a little bit of thinking in all the blasting.