#294: Build Engine WW2 games
Before Medal of Honor, before Call of Duty, there was… whatever this is
This review was originally posted on Twitter on July 13, 2020.
WW2GI
Initial release: Mar 15, 1999
Platform: PC
Developer: TNT Team
Saving Private Ryan TC
Initial release: January 16, 2000
Platform: PC (Duke Nukem 3D mod)
Developer: Edge Designs
Like any other medium, the video game industry often goes through weird transition periods, affected by economic factors, technological advances, or — quite often — just chasing the hot new flavor of the month. Perhaps the best example of this is the late 1990s, when a desire for greater scope — after all, this was the era of 3D acceleration, Final Fantasy VII, and the Nintendo 64 — just hadn’t quite caught up with the technology.
Saving Private Ryan was a milestone in cinema, an altogether important film that, regardless of its strengths or weaknesses, changed how we look at war movies. And as video games are forever riding on the coattails of movies, imitations were not far behind. Before Call of Duty, before Medal of Honor even, there was WW2GI. For twenty years, this title by TNT Team, a small group of Finnish gamers (with no relation to Team TNT of Final Doom fame) was the last commercially-released game to use the legendary Build engine, which powered titles like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood.
TNT Team had already cut their teeth on modding for Duke Nukem 3D with the semi-popular Platoon mod (based on the Vietnam War movie of the same name); the planned sequel was picked up by GT Interactive and turned into the commercial game NAM. While that experience did not translate into a great game, it was popular enough (probably due to being sold in Walmart) to warrant a World War II-themed sequel.
The end result is amateurish at best; aside from several reused Duke3D assets, the game is riddled with poor design decisions, ranging from bad level design to just outright infuriating gameplay. The first thing the game does, literally the very first thing, is throw you into the meatgrinder with a recreation of the Omaha Beach landings. You will die. You will die a lot. You will die randomly. You will die for seemingly no reason at all. Welcome to WW2GI.
So you get to listen to your CO yell “what do I look like, a German soldier!?” over and over while you figure out, through trial and error, what you’re supposed to do (use explosions to first destroy some barbed wire, then destroy a wall blocking you from the top of the beach.) In place of armor you get something called “morale,” which changes based on a number of things — Allied soldiers dying, SS troops shooting at you, SS troops dying, healing yourself, and so on. If it drops to zero, that’s it, you’re dead. Speaking of healing yourself, the health system is kind of bullshit too. You can carry two medkits at a time. Using them will heal up to 35 health, but the key thing is that you cannot move. Move, and the healing stops. (you can still look around.) Healing is also slow.
Actually fighting the enemy is an exercise in frustration. While they don’t, as a rule, take a lot to put down — a single burst of Thompson fire will kill a grunt with ease — they can just as easily tear you to shreds, which is reminiscent of Wolfenstein 3D’s deadly combat, but far more frustrating. It would almost be fine except for a few issues. Their reaction times are often insane — they’re capping you before you’ve even seen them. Another is that due to the way Duke 3D’s version of the engine works, they’re often invincible until they’ve ‘seen’ you and are activated. This isn’t an issue endemic to Duke 3D’s stock levels, mind you — rather, it’s an issue with the enemy sprites being a tad too large as placed within the map editor, and the game must resize them, which it only does upon aggro. It’s often a problem in custom Duke maps.
Ultimately, there’s not much I can say for this game. It’s a turd. Some of the levels are relatively nice looking, but I’ve also seen much better custom Duke 3D levels from the same time period. The ambient sound effects are sometimes poorly chosen, and the music is dull.
I don’t count Wolfenstein 3D as a “true” World War II shooter due to its abstract nature and primitive engine; as important as it is, it’s very much a product of its time. WW2GI in that sense is much closer to Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, but as the first “true” World War II FPS it’s shit.
(By the way, it does in fact predate the original Medal of Honor by a few months — I checked.)
After WW2GI’s release, TNT Team went on to release a free, downloadable expansion pack called Platoon Leader, featuring three additional levels with new features. As the title suggests, this is at least partially ’Nam-themed, but one level is set in World War II’s Pacific theater, and requires you to climb a hill covered in enemy and… do something. I can’t figure out how to not fail the mission and I don’t care enough to try.
But as grumpy as WW2GI makes me, I must admit that it’s a far more professional outing than… are you ready for it? the Saving Private Ryan TC for Duke Nukem 3D. (“TC” stands for total conversion, a somewhat antedeluvian term for what we’d now simply call a mod.)
Movie-based game mods are nothing new. Aliens Doom is one of the all-time classics; hell, NAM and WW2GI only even exist because of the aforementioned Platoon mod. And one of the best mods for Duke Nukem 3D in the late 90s was based on the movie Starship Troopers of all things. But Saving Private Ryan TC is just atrocious. The main issue with it is that there’s simply no game. Five levels represent key scenes from the movie, from the Omaha Beach sequence to the ruined town (complete with spilled apple cart) to the radar bunker, the field, and the finale. None of these levels have anything resembling good gameplay design. At best, they’re built around very small centerpieces. A good example would be the second level; aside from a few random soldiers, the key part of the map involves killing the sniper, which can be done in seconds.
It’s clear that the designers were after a cinematic experience, but the result is that the game can be gotten through in about 15 minutes, with ten of those minutes spent on the awful first level. It’s a shame: the levels have good visuals, but it’s all flash and no thunder.
The first Medal of Honor released in late 1999 to critical acclaim; while it’s little more than a Goldeneye 64 clone with a World War II skin on, it’s still a fine game in its own right. Perhaps the main reason it was successful was because it was running in an engine designed for it. The Build engine is great for those old-school FPS games (what the kids are calling ‘boomer shooters’ now) where you have like a million guns and blow up a zillion enemies and it’s all hectic combat a la Doom or Duke Nukem. a realistic warfare experience? Not so much.
The best I can say for WW2GI and Saving Private Ryan TC is they represent a forgotten part of gaming history; but, for more reasons than just being bad, it’s clear that perhaps they deserve to be forgotten.
