War-themed hat scavenging simulator Men Of War is a series we haven’t talked about for a while, but it’s taking another foray beyond the bounds of its traditional World War Two setting today.

Men Of War: Assault Squad 2 – Cold War, a title I long to sarcastically add more punctuation to, is out now, and promises singleplayer, cooperative, and competitive yankee/soviet warbangs, and a brand new dynamic campaign generator. Some thoughts, reservations, and traily bits follow.



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Ayup. That’s some Men Of War, alright. The super-granular battling series’s defining feature is the ability to directly control any unit at any time. Tanks, static guns, even the unarmed penal conscripts in that one level of the Soviet campaign. It works remarkably well, and the Assault Squad series scales things down to make them more manageable, but none of them reduced the amount of babysitting needed in longer fights. Since the very first game, soldiers have shown no initiative in fetching ammunition, and it’s cool that your hat can get shot off but you then have to tell them to put it back on, the divs.

There’s a reason why Jim Rossignol (me neither) called its last big entry “a wonderful ogre”. There’s no word on what, if any improvements in that area will come with Cold War, but there are glimpses of a new interface in that trailer at least.

Of definite interest are the dynamic campaigns, which “make singleplayer and co-op extremely replayable, with randomized skirmishes and custom army compositions”. And I suppose you might really want some post-WWII superpower scuffles, although it rather misses the historical point to have the US and USSR openly shooting at each other. Get some partisans, lads. They’ll do it all for you, with no long-term consequences.

Men Of War: Assault Squad 2 – Cold War is out now on Steam. A 10% launch discount brings it to £17.99/€19.79/$22.49 until next Thursday.