Anyone seen P.O.W. [Archive] - Xbox Addict Asylum

DZNUTZ

04-19-2002, 01:27 PM

Being in the middle of a World War is no picnic, and being captured is even less of a good time. Codemasters pays tribute to the Allied escape attempts made by brave POW’s from their captors during World War II in Prisoners of War. The game takes place across heavily guarded German POW camps where you will become Captain Lewis Stone, an American Flight Officer taken prison by the German military. In a time before computer controlled strike forces and radar tracking guidance systems, your resourcefulness and will to live were your best weapons in war. You will need to make sure you have plenty of wits and courage to escape and successfully complete your surveillance mission and subsequently report back to Churchill’s Special Operations Executive in London, England.

After spending a few days inside the enemy’s camps and being watched by countless numbers of armed guards, tower patrols, and short tempered commanders, I feel like I should be awarded a medal of valor for everything I was put through as Captain Stone. This game is hard, very hard, and you won’t accomplish much without forming well thought out plans that utilize the cooperation of your fellow POW’s. You will need to communicate with other prisoners in order to gain tips and tricks for moving around the compounds undetected. This game is all about stealth and making your way from place to place without leaving any tracks. In order to learn more ways around, you’ll have to bribe other prisoners that means completing little tasks such as retrieving contraband material that serve as money. If you can prove your worth, the other POW’s will trust you more and fill you in on the more secret and protected events going on in camp. If you think you can slip out without any help, think again, you’ll need to work with your allies on this one.

The game starts out as your plane goes down and you are surrounded by members of the German forces who swiftly escort you to your new home. Far from a cozy little home, the Germans will quickly get you adjusted to their system and work you through the repetition that will become your daily life as long as you remain in camp. You will be surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards almost everywhere you look. You will be forced to show up at certain locations during certain times of the day for regular check-ins. If you are seconds late, you will find yourself the focus of a camp wide search. When this happens there are only 2 options, being shot or surrendering and spending a couple days in solitary confinement.

Time is a vital factor in the game, as you will race against the clock to escape before you wind up in a camp you can’t escape. You will be moved from camp to camp, but if you sit around too long, you’ll end up in the type of camp where there are no further plans for your imprisonment if you know what I mean, and I’m not talking about being released through the front gates either. Time goes by much faster than real time of course otherwise the game could take months to complete, which might not be bad, but when you consider that some things you will need to do take place at night, or another specific time of day, you won’t want to stare off into the sky waiting for that time to come. You can “Time Skip” in the game if you need to advance to the right time of day to pull off a planned tactic. If you find out at breakfast that one of the guards has been bribed off his nightly watch, you can simply skip ahead to nightfall and begin your task. If I had to guess, minutes in the game go by in a second and if you watch the clock it seems like 1 minute of real time equates to 1 hour gametime.

Prisoner of War’s graphics are good enough to make you feel like you are part of the historic time period in which the game takes place. The camps look authentic enough to have been pulled from one of your high school’s history books. The game boasts some advanced audio features that scales the intensity of the soundtrack according to the action and tempo of the game action. The gameplay itself is very intuitive and you will find yourself immersed in the character of Captain Stone while avoiding guards, spotlights, and dogs in an effort to gather useful information and equipment while plotting your escape. The controls are easy to pick up and learning the moves takes practice, but you will get the hang of it without too much trouble. You will do everything from impersonating guards to masterminding mass escapes before you finally call in Allied air strikes using the German’s own radio system.

Since this isn’t a full review, I won’t ruin the story and go into great detail, but I can tell you that if you are a fan of Rambo: First Blood Part 2, or any other war movie where the hero has to escape some type of capture, you will love Prisoner of War. However, you won’t be ripping the chain gun from a Russian helicopter and screaming at the top of your lungs while blowing up every single thing in sight, but you will take full advantage of your military training and human instincts to escape. As I said earlier, this is a very hard game from what I have played so far, and you don’t simply waltz around the camps without being seen most of the time. You will have to take advantage of all the windows of opportunity that you can find and pull of well planned chains of events that will hopefully lead you to freedom, and more importantly, the completion of your initial mission. Codemaster’s Prisoner of War will test your wits and your courage as you struggle to escape on of history’s most notorious military forces.

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