Xbox Hardware & Games

With three unique paths, Hour of Victory should be triple the fun. Should be.

When Midway announced they planned to create yet another World War II game, my first thought was, “With Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Brothers in Arms, do we need another take on fighting the Nazis and liberating Europe?” This isn’t to belittle the exploits of the “greatest generation,” but the story has been told already, and it seemed hard that this version could be original or fresh. The idea of playing just another grunt didn’t exactly inspire me to be first in line to sign up for another tour. However, Hour of Victory’s promise to be more along the lines of The Dirty Dozen than Saving Private Ryan, as well as the fact that the game offers a multi-perspective gimmick, made it sound actually interesting.

Well, perhaps sticking with my original impressions would have been the way to go. Unfortunately, the game is full of bugs, features poor renderings, and just looks like it was rushed out. If this were the way the Allies approached the invasion of Europe in 1944, the Germans would have won. We’ve come to expect this sort of mess from time to time with PC games, but, as a console title, it has reached new levels of low. Whether a patch (for those with an Xbox 360 with hard drive) can even solve the problems is a mystery worthy of a game itself.

It’s too bad, because Hour of Victory sounded like an interesting take on the traditional first-person shooter. In a traditional WWII shooter, you play through each single-player level as one lonely GI, tasked with doing everything. Here, though, you get the option to play as one of three different soldiers, including a British commando, an Army Ranger, and an OSS operative. Each has his own special skills and style, so you can run and gun with the commando, use stealth as the OSS guy, or snipe from a safe distance as the Ranger. Each path offers different challenges, and you can even play through the missions with each soldier if you like, making this a mutli-single-player game.

Set in the North African and European theaters of operation, Hour of Victory is nonetheless a generic take on the war. So don’t expect any terribly realistic settings; even Hogan’s Heroes offered a more accurate depiction of uniforms and order of battle. However, the mindless approach to WWII should have been fun regardless. If the game didn’t lock up at times, feature nearly mindless AI and levels so short you’re sure you missed something, it would be worth playing. But, in the current state, there is no reason to waste even a minute on this Hour.

On the graphical front lines, the game just doesn’t look very good either. While Hour of Victory supports 480p, 720p, and 1080p resolutions with native 16:9 widescreen perspective, the result is just really clear and sharp bad graphics—as opposed to really blurry bad graphics. This one actually pales when compared with early Xbox or PS2 games, as well. In other words, it isn’t a pretty game, nor does it sound particularly impressive. The audio is generic, flat, and uninspiring. The gunfire lacks any punch; the music is typical and at times even annoying; and the dialogue is uneven at best.

Because of its unique option to really try things from a different direction using different skills, Hour of Victory sounded like a winner. But, after I struggled through it for a few days, the only victory I realized was that I did not have to play it again.

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