Prisoner of War Preview

Codemasters seem to be focusing more on nitty-gritty war games as of late (He's referring to Bohemia's 1985 squad-based shooter Operation Flashpoint - Ed). And just like Flashpoint, POW is also being developed by outside Codemasters' or to be more specific, it's being developed by the British-based Wide Games. Even though this is just the working title, Prisoner of War gives you rather an accurate idea of what the game is gonna be about. You will get to play the roles of POWs confined in four high security compounds during WWII: Salonika, Stalag Luft I, Stalag Luft III, and finally the notorious Colditz Castle.

This was announced to be an original project, but older moviegoer will surely remember Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson in the legendary "The Great Escape", just like older players probably already think of the wonderful moments they spent with their Commodore 64 or Amiga playing Escape from Colditz. The game definitely has some similarities with this project, as you will be able to separately lead four allied officers... I cannot remember if the old game also featured a British, French, Dutch and US character, but I remember they were all quite different and that strongly influenced your strategy and gameplay....

I don't know if there will be any female characters, but what I do know is that each of them will have several stats which are quite important if you want to escape from somewhere: athleticism, stealth, espionage, charm, linguistic, reconnaissance etc... The first characteristic will directly influence your physical capabilities (speed, strength, and ability to carry unconscious Nazi soldiers around), the second one will influence your ability to go unnoticed, and reconnaissance will act like a sixth sense - you will be more likely to know if anybody is watching you and where from, and where are the enemy soldiers situated. The charismatic characters with better communication skills will, on the other hand, excel at talking their way out of sticky situations... It will be up to you to decide what kind of a game you want to play, and whatever you choose you can be sure you're in for an experience full of suspense and drama. If you're an action type and like to "blow stuff up", you'll most likely decide you want to set some explosives around the camp before you get out, and if you are the athletic type, you can try to escape using an improvised paraglide during an air raid...

You won't be alone in the German prisons; there will be quite a lot of nazi soldiers and a couple of friendly NPCs there. You will be able to engage in basic forms of communication with both soldiers and other prisoners. The interface used for this is rather small as the authors wanted to leave the players focused on action. There's also the unavoidable compass, on-screen "radar" which tracks the relative position of other characters and the rest of the commands...

As for the visuals, POW will use the so-called 3D Atlas engine, which has been under development for quite some time at the Wide Software studios. They pointed out that it supports features like hardware T&L, bump and specular mapping, dynamic lights, environmental mapping effects that enable rendering reflective surfaces, particle systems... To be quite honest, I wasn't too thrilled about the screenshots. What I saw was objects with extremely low poly-count, very ugly textures (especially sky and ground textures) and poor weather effects which might be becoming for a game that appeared three years ago, but look completely ridiculous on a game that should appear roughly the same time as DOOM III. I hope that these shots only represent early phases of testing the engine and that a lot of things still have to be corrected (the main character completely lacks shadow on some shots, has circular shadow on other shots and even has a decent shadow on the latest shots, so I suppose that these definitely are preliminary screenshots). On the other hand, I like the general appearance of the characters and the idea of bone-based skeletal and continuous free-form mesh deforming animation, which is supported by the engine. Another nice feature is that the weather effects and time of day influence gameplay and AI: The guards won't see too well in the dark of night, but they will be more cautious, there will be less guards out while it is snowing, and their vision will be short-ranged, etc... This means you will have to adapt your tactics to current conditions.

[Wide Games has since commented on our concerns about the visuals, and here's what they had to say: "You are right in that the shots you have seen are full of placeholder graphics and not indicative of even the current in-game visuals."

Bottom line: The graphics are still in a very early stage, and there is no doubt that the final product will look much prettier once the title is ready to ship.]

Prisoner of War sounds interesting, even if it doesn't look like much at this point. Well, what the heck, I guess there's a lot more work to be done to give us a complete PC/PSX2 product... Including the easiest bit: devising a title.