The Xbox platforms as a whole have become synonymous with first person shooters over the years, what with the likes of Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequel on the original Xbox. Though on the Xbox 360, in its already short life span there have been a fair few World War II games that take on the genre, what with the likes of the fantastic Call of Duty series and its upcoming modern day take on the franchise. Midway’s step into World War II history is by no means a pretty affair with Hour of Victory, which takes a little something from everything and some how manages to completely screw it up.

Gameplay:

In terms of general controls Hour of Victory not only looks like a Call of Duty clone but it also has a very similar control scheme The worst part though is that a dramatic portion of everything else is broken; which doesn’t really captivate at all to engross the gamer as the majority of what goes on either just plays awkward or just does not work well for the most part.

Before you undertake each mission you get to choose one of the three characters that you can play as; you play exactly the same mission with each character but may take an alternative path with each of the soldiers. For example with Taggert you can pick locks and generally sneak around with your trusty combat knife, which oddly is more lethal than a gun, you can literally just run through some of the missions slashing away at the enemies. Playing as Ross enables you to push heavier objects out of the way which may be blocking your path, or the most amusingly stupid one is with Bull, who can find a rope leading up to the top of a building and when you go to interact with this rope the silly old chap decides to pull an anchor and rope from his rear and proceeds to throw this up and uses it to climb up instead of using the rope that was already in place.

Quite simply put, Hour of Victory had potential and the control mechanics are in place but with such unfinished, buggy and broken animations, this just does not lead to an enjoyable gaming experience. There were several times where some of the animations and other graphical effects did not perform as though I would have imagined them intended to be i.e. one of your superiors runs to kick down a door but gets caught on an object and still does the animation to kick the door down from 15 feet away and successfully kicks it down, perhaps there was just a strong passing of wind as he lifted his leg (we shall never know).

Graphics:

Hour of Victory really does take the most noticeable things from the Call of Duty series and it does resemble it in its general look and feel, just think small indoors and outdoor areas as opposed to Call of Duty’s epic scale – just go to the kitchen and chop some onions for an hour and you will not be able to tell the difference between the two games visually, seriously. However, without the teary-eyes then Call of Duty looks vastly superior as opposed to the shameful looking Hour of Victory.

Sound:

Maybe this is just me, but the game’s soundtrack reminds me of Indiana Jones, which to be honest fits quite well with the game’s interior levels and compliments them very well. Voice-overs on the other hand are on the borderline of “extreme cheese”. The usual sound effects from firing weapons, grenade explosions are all obviously included but there seems to be no real impact behind them, they just seem flat which then in turn leaves the tension and drama of the game, oh so flat on its face as well.

Longevity:

Hour of Victory will last for as long as you can bear to play through this extremely broken game. I was always under the impression that Microsoft had a rather strict quality assurance policy in place to protect us gamers from experiencing such unfinished and broken tripe such as this, I guess that theory is out the window now then. Funnily enough I did find an “Hour of Enjoyment” for the first part of the game, I think I just enjoyed the running through but still for these moments many odd occurrences of graphical glitches were still present.

Overall:

Avoid this game unless you absolutely thrive on World War II FPS carnage, perhaps rent it just to laugh and giggle at how bad it really is, then realise you could have used that rental money for something else, enjoyable. If you’re fairly new to the Xbox 360 platform and have played Call of Duty 3 but skipped the launch title of Call of Duty 2, then I would recommend you go and buy CoD2 instead as that certainly offers an exhilarating campaign mode and a very well thought out competent online multiplayer mode to boot – basically any other World War II FPS out currently is much, much better than Hour of Victory. If you’re an Xbox Live member then you can always give Hour of Victory an hour of your time with the campaign demo available on the marketplace.