![]() We’ve consulted the history books, and we’re pretty sure none of this happened. 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 singlehandedly 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. It’s harder for online WW2 games to retain a respectful tone, but this one does it by amply conveying the horrors of attritional war and the abject terror of being one solider placed in a vast conflict. Staying alive is as valuable as getting kills - but at first both seem next to impossible with only an old bolt-action rifle to defend yourself with. Respawns can only be done at player-built structures, or, if said structures have been overrun, way back behind the action. This is multiplayer FPS done hardcore, a kind of warts-and-all Battlefield where teams fight to either push forward or hold a position. ![]() Not that you don’t already feel pretty vulnerable when you realize one bullet can, and will, end you. Funny as it may sound, small touches like that go a long way towards creating a sense of futility and vulnerability. There’s something unnerving about the sparse UI of Hell Let Loose. Its cutscenes are serviceable as tone setters, but like the very best RTS games, it tells a compelling story through the missions themselves. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. With World War 2 firmly in the director’s head during the production of Saving Private Ryan, he set his Dreamworks 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. ![]() 1999’s Medal of Honor came about after Steven Spielberg watched his son playing GoldenEye on his N64. We’re starting this list by paying our dues. Perspectives that place you in the boots of an infantryman, a general, or more often than not, an incredibly tough supersoldier capable of turning the tide - if not wrapping the whole thing up -singlehandedly. 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. 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. When we play games set during WW2, you could argue we’re actually revisiting the silver-screen version, albeit in interactive form. The movies of the early 1940s portrayed heroic deeds in a war that didn’t bear much resemblance to the horrific reality, and as the 20th century continued, so did the tradition of World War II in a fictionalized setting. ![]() The conflict is unique in that its fictionalization began as it was still taking place. An odd couple - one an entertainment medium, the other one of the most harrowing periods in world history - but one that endures.
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