The PC game market is flooded with numerous WWII-themed titles. So, what's one more? To be fair, Soldiers pays very close attention to detail and offers up some interesting and unique gameplay. Single player campaigns let you take control of American, German, British or Russian forces. All the vehicles and weapons look and move authentically. The environments look great and are completely destructible. Troops can hide in bushes and or tall grass, take cover behind walls and debris, or garrison a house by breaking its windows and shooting out from them. Tanks can blast or drive through houses or walls, although doing the latter might cause your track to break off.

Tanks and other vehicles play a huge role in the game. They can be damaged in individual locations, so they can be disabled by having their tires shot out, but they can still return fire as long as their gun is ok. Afterward, it's just a matter of equipping a unit with a repair kit to get most vehicles up and running again. Tanks generally have heavily armored areas and weak spots when a well-aimed shot will do the most damage. When shot in the gas tank with an explosive shell, vehicles blow apart nicely. Tires will fly off, turrets will break away, and troops can be sent airborne with a well-placed explosive. However, all this detail takes an incredible toll on performance, as the game slows down to an absolute crawl when too many units are on the screen at once.

Another unique feature that Soldiers offers is the ability to take direct control of a unit. Doing so allows you to manually aim and fire their guns and move them using the keyboard. Although this appears to have been meant as a secondary feature, it quickly becomes a necessity, as your computer controlled units tend to be very unreliable. Sometimes they don't react to units who run into their line of sight. Other times, they won't follow orders to retreat or find cover. When using a machine gun nest, units might fire endlessly at nothing. Oftentimes, they will shoot and miss moving targets when they are left on their own, wasting precious ammunition.

All units have to be supplied with weapons and ammunition, mostly picked up from fallen enemies. Each unit has its own individual inventory, and every weapon uses its own type of ammunition, like in an RPG game. Machine guns can even be removed from tanks or armored cars and carried around. There are over 100 weapons in this game ranging from machine guns, to grenades, to anti-tank guns. Troops will have to raid corpses for guns and bullets and search through disabled tanks for shells. Tanks and other vehicles require fuel, which a soldier can siphon from other vehicles. The amount of depth is incredible. For tanks to run efficiently, they need to be outfitted with a full crew - a driver, a loader, a gunner, and a commander. Take any of these elements away, and you immediately start seeing the effects. Moving with just two people means that the turret won't move as it is being reloaded (because the gunner is loading the shell). Using just one makes the tank almost unusable, as it has to come to a dead stop to reload and shoot. The one thing we found odd about this amount of detail was the fact that all ammunition (shells, bullets, etc.) needs to be put on the tank's storage area. If individual soldiers are carrying tank ammunition on their person, it doesn't automatically load. You have to order the unit out of the tank then go through a process of moving inventory from one place to another.

When all things are taken into consideration, you have to realize that Soldiers is not the fast paced type of RTS most people are used to. A lot of slow plotting and a ton of trial-and-error are needed in order to succeed in this game. Expect to do a lot of restarting before finding out the key way to winning a mission. At times, the pace can be absolutely excruciating, especially since it is spread out across 30 missions in four campaigns. It doesn't help that you often have to face near impossible odds with every mission. Make no mistake about this: Soldiers is not an easy game. The very first mission in the Russian campaign puts you in the middle of the battlefield with one tank, two infantry, and one lightly armored car. That is all you have to face up against a town heavily fortified by the German army! Though there is an in-depth training, there are no beginner missions to help ease players in. The awkward controls will have you constantly switching between the keyboard and mouse. The game allows players to pause or put things into slow motion while issuing orders, which helps, but it is generally very difficult to coordinate forces. Setting the mission to "easy" doesn't appear to help much either.

Oftentimes it is far easier to let all but one or a few of your units be killed so you can exert direct control to get through an area. A minor problem we experienced was that the game relies too heavily on the left mouse button. The same click that selects a unit is the same one that orders a soldier to board a vehicle, requiring an extra click to unselect between units. This is something that is very easy to forget when trying to quickly coordinate things. So, while trying to switch from infantry to tank, you might accidentally order the soldier to leave his post and jump onto the vehicle. It can also sometimes be difficult to select a unit when he is standing too close to a tank.

Multiplayer was originally supposed include head-to-head deathmatch, but shipped with only the co-op mode. Up to four players can join together in any of the campaigns or stand alone missions. Each person is assigned their own troops and vehicles at the start of the match and may transfer them to each other as needed. The cooperative feature helps alleviate the problem of being overwhelmed when playing alone. However, the slow-downs are still present and there is no player matching service. LAN games are easy to put together, otherwise the only option is to connect via direct IP.

Soldiers is a slow paced and difficult game, but this also makes the satisfaction of finishing each mission greater. The graphics are excellent, everything is finely detailed, and the sound effects are very good - although some of the unit responses may be a little over-the-top. At the same time, the negative aspects are enough to turn many players away. However, if you're looking for something different from the standard form of RTS and appreciate a good challenge, Soldiers is worth checking out.