World War II Combat: Road to Berlin

The Good
Still looking; this game sucks. Actually, it can be considered a plus that the game is so horrible, it's funny.

The Bad
Well, just about everything else. I mean, I know that this is a budget title, but that's still no excuse for the very poor quality of this game. Let's see here...we've got a laundry list of serious technical and gameplay problems...

WWII Combat: Road To Berlin obviously wasn't finished when it came out (despite some delays), which is made obvious by the fact that the game is chock-full of bugs. The animations for characters are awful, given the fact that they look like cardboard targets sliding on ice. The controls are so unresponsive that you'll think you spilled some soda on your controller. The graphics and level designs are truly among the very worst on the Xbox; all of the textures and models look very chunky and blocky, and the polygon count is extremely low, despite the fact that this game uses the Unreal 2 engine. The sound effects are every bit as horrible as the graphics, with a god-awful musical score that sounds like it was taken from a movie released in the 1920's, terrible voice acting, and unsatisfying weapon sounds that all sound the same for each gun. The threat reticule is also totally broken, since it always reports random results no matter where you're getting shot from. And the AI? Axis and Allied soldiers don't use any kind of strategy to take down the enemy or achieve mission objectives, but it also seems that the developers didn't do anything to differentiate Axis AI from Allied AI. The Allied soldiers will shoot at you instead of the Axis, as if they were on the Axis side, too. But killing an Allied soldier means Game Over, making the game nearly unplayable. Thankfully, most of the game is spent fighting Axis by yourself rather than with allies.

WWII Combat: Road to Berlin is made even more frustrating by design flaws that prove that the game was put together at the very last minute. The guns have all sorts of problems that make them no fun to use. The pistol feels terribly weak, the machine guns are pathetically inaccurate, and all weapons suffer from sluggish firing rates and reloading times -- even the heavy machine gun seems like it fires at only two bullets per second. You can't pick up any medkits during a level; your health only recharges at the end of each level, which proves to be frustrating because the game is very difficult. You can't pick up any weapons from fallen enemies; you can only pick up their ammo, which also proves to be frustrating as you only start the level with the pistol and another weapon, which is either a machine gun or sniper rifle. If this gun happens to be a sniper rifle, then you are stuck only using the pistol for close combat. Ugh. You also only have one save slot per profile, and you can't save manually (the game uses a checkpoint save system).

The Bottom Line
Please, don't play this garbage. Almost everything else on the market is vastly better than this unplayable pile of crap.