As a veteran of the old Hidden & Dangerous (see my HD site here if you're interested) I was both excited and dubious about the new game. Excited because as much as I loved HD, I had long wished for a more modern version that would take advantage of the latest computer capabilities; dubious because, let's face it, these new versions of older games often turn out worse than the original. At the time HD2 was announced I was still getting over the disappointment of the Forgotten Battles game, which basically ruined the excellent Il-2 Sturmovik combat flight sim; and as for Combat Flight Simulator 3, the less said the better....

Well, I was worried about nothing. HD2 turned out to be, on the whole and with very few exceptions, an exponential advance over dear old HD. So much so that the relationship might not be obvious unless one has played both games; the whole look has been changed.

In fact the two games are so different that the comparison really isn't fair; it's not quite apples and oranges - or, more aptly, checkers and chess - but it nearly is. The two games have a different feel, a different atmosphere.

HD was a game Franz Kafka might have designed; it bears the same relationship to the real World War II as Kafka's fictional Amerika bore to the country he had never visited and knew very little about. HD always looks and feels like being inside an impressionistic painting; everything has a surreal quality - which is why you don't really mind the horrendous historic and technical errors, or the wildly improbable nature of most of the missions, or the loony behavior of the AIs. HD is its own world, and such an immersive, internally consistent one that you quickly come to accept it on its own terms - and indeed that was always part of its charm.

(This was not, as you might think at first glance, entirely the result of technological limitations; it was also a matter of artistic style. The later add-on package, which created the final Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe version, contained a couple of missions set in the Ardennes campaign which for realistic graphics and game play come quite close in many respects to the quality of HD2. So the old engine was capable of more; HD wasn't inherently weird, it was just drawn that way....)

HD2 takes a far more "realistic" approach - realistic in the artistic sense: aimed at creating the illusion of representational realism - and succeeds probably as well as is possible within the limitations of current computer graphics technology; in general look and feel it is far closer to such games as Medal of Honor or (the closest comparison) Call of Duty than to its nominal ancestor. The visual details are so much more sophisticated that really there is no comparison.

Characters in HD had only a few faces (and even fewer in the Deluxe version, which got pared down drastically in an effort to improve performance) and these rather crude and expressionless; you tried to avoid face to face situations because they could be a bit disturbing, like pod people or maybe the Living Dead.

The blokes (and babes) in HD2 all have lively, expressive individual faces with eyes that blink and lips that move. (Not always in very close synch with their voices, but picky picky.) I remember the first time I started the game, and during the startup "training camp" mission I got curious and wandered off the course, ignoring Sergeant Sir, to look around. I walked up to this bloke who was standing by a building, and he looked at me and he BLINKED, and it just blew me away; I'd never seen anything like it.

And when the lads in HD moved about, they had a few invariable mechanical-doll motions; they always looked comical running. HD2 characters move in a far more lifelike manner; when they're wearing abbreviated uniforms, as in the desert, or those rubber frogman suits, you can even make out the movement of their muscles. Even when they're not moving, they don't just stand there like statues; they shift about, turn their heads and look around and so on.

One really nice new feature is getting to select uniforms for your people. There isn't really that much of a selection, but still it adds something; and some of the outfits are really sharp, like those neato bush hats in Burma.

As for the AIs that control them, they're not quite as gormless as they were in HD, but they're still idiots. And it seems worse because they look so lifelike that you somehow expect more of them. You tend to forget that in the end what you're looking at is just a set of small subprograms.

As for the bad guys, they're much more aggressive and intelligent than they were in HD; where the Germans in HD would stand around while you picked them off one by one, these bastards will come at you in a bunch as soon as you piss them off.

(They're also much more realistic in appearance, which is something I have mixed feelings about; the dead bodies look like dead bodies, complete with blank staring faces. This aspect of realism may be disturbing to some. But what did you think war was, a paintball game?

Physical objects likewise are rendered in more detail. Particularly the vegetable world; the grass and weeds are really fantastic - and this is important, because quite often you use them for concealment, so you've got them right in your face. The realistic depiction of grass and weeds, and the way they move as you push through them, is one of the most impressive accomplishments of HD2.

Some of the trees, notably the conifers in the Norwegian missions, are somewhat less complex, reminiscent of the trees in the Ardennes campaign in the final HDD package. In general, though, the trees are better done; when you push through them, you have the feel of living foliage, not a paper cutout, and the trunks are no longer square.

It's in the Burma campaign, though, that HD2 reaches its peak in depicting vegetation. Here we can't even make a comparison, because HD never attempted anything of the sort. The jungle is rendered so convincingly that it feels oppressive; you can fairly feel all that life, and death, around you.

All this, however, comes with a price: vegetation really hits performance in this game. A computer setup that can handle the desert and urban and interior scenes quite well may still bog down and go slideshow in the forest missions and become unplayable in the jungle, even with the graphics turned all the way down.

HD2 doesn't go in for the rich, baroque buildings and interiors that made some of the HD missions a guilty pleasure. This time they held down the fancy stuff, and I have to admit I rather miss it, corny as it sometimes was. (You do get some paintings in Castle Babenstein, enough to make an HD veteran nostalgic.)

However, you still get the elaborately detailed Domestic Life Of The Third Reich interiors - the sleeping quarters with the chess sets and cards, the fully equipped kitchens, the toilets and so on - and the simpler buildings still have their own charm; the German encampment on the "iceberg" in the first campaign is weirdly reminiscent of Sweet Haven in the Popeye movie.

I miss the railroad stuff; there's only one train station in HD2 and the mission takes place at night so you can't really appreciate the details of the switch yard and so on. HD sometimes was like a really neat model railroad layout and I wish they'd done more of that in HD2.

There is still that fascination with subterranean complexes. Anyone who fought his way through the underground submarine base in HD will instantly recognize the island fortress or the secret Nazi bunker. (The designers of HD2 have a somewhat improved grasp of what a scientific research facility ought to look like, but only somewhat: in HD the labs looked like something out of a late-night mad-scientist B movie, while in HD2 they look like somebody's high school chem lab.)

HD2 doesn't have as many chances to drive cars and trucks as HD did, and the vehicles it does offer aren't nearly as enjoyable to drive - except for the Jeep, which still doesn't handle as realistically as the one in the HDD add-on Ardennes campaign. You only get one chance to drive a Kubelwagen, and it's really bad; and one chance to drive a halftrack, which doesn't have a machine gun so you can't really do much with it.

There's only one mission that involves any extended driving, and they made such a mess of that one that you can't really enjoy the driving part. All in all I do miss the driving in HD, and I don't think they did the vehicles as well.

On the other hand you do get to play with tanks on several occasions, and that's a lot of fun. HD didn't let you drive tanks; it let you operate a tank's main gun in one mission and even that was so badly done that it wasn't at all enjoyable.

It's too bad, though, that they didn't try a little harder to make the tanks correct. Oh, they look OK externally, for what they're supposed to be; but they're missing an important detail - no coaxial machine gun. All battle tanks used in World War II had a machine gun in the turret, alongside the main gun; I don't know why they left this out. (Though the absence of a coax MG certainly makes life a lot easier when you're up against them.)

But the tanks are still much better than the ones in HD, which had no machine guns at all, and which couldn't even traverse fully - you could walk right up behind one and it was helpless.

You don't get to operate any boats at all in HD2. (Unless you count those damn fool "midget submarine" things.) That's OK with me; I have memories of that cranky, impossible river boat in HD and I don't miss it.

The airplanes are enormously improved in terms of appearances - the planes in HD gave you the impression that whoever drew them had never even seen an airplane close up; these are graphically excellent, up to flight-sim standards - but their performance is still wildly unrealistic and their armament incorrect.

I've given a detailed breakdown of the various small arms on another page of this site. In more general terms, the weapons are certainly better rendered in HD2 - with a couple of exceptions - and perform more realistically. There are some neat new details, such as the ejected brass flying up and out. (Picky time again, though: screenshots reveal that the primers all remain undented.)

One very welcome new feature, perhaps imitated from Call of Duty, is the "iron sights" option - the ability to actually aim, using sights, rather than just pointing with the little white cross mark. The only criticism I have, and it applies to CoD as well, is that the sights are too sharp and clear, particularly the rear one. In real world shooting, the rear sight will be blurred; you don't see it, as we were so often told, you look through it. With a peep sight, as on the M-1 rifle and carbine, you don't consciously see the rear sight at all; it's just a vague dark circle around your field of vision. So the sight pictures look a little funny if you have any experience with the real thing; but still it's an excellent feature.

Oddly, however, HD2 took a step back in one respect: you can no longer sight a pistol at all, as you could in HD. You can only point it.

Grenades aren't as buggy as they were in HD, but they still can be pretty cranky and unpredictable. For some reason instead of the British Mills bomb, which would be the correct grenade for the SAS, they've changed over to the American pineapple-style fragmentation grenade, which as far as I know was never used by the British at all.

They made the Fairbairn knife look right this time, as well as adding an imaginary "German fighting knife." Now, though, you just about have to come up on a man from behind in order to stab him - try it from in front and he's liable to step back and say something indignant and shoot your nuts off - whereas in HD you could walk up to his face and gut him if you liked.

No comparison as to the main event sounds: gunshots, explosions etc. The gunshots in HD always were pretty anemic and certainly didn't sound like real gunfire; these are a lot more convincing. (They still don't sound like the real thing - at least the weapons I've personally fired in real life, and I've fired most of them at one time or another - but if they did you'd risk damaging your hearing. Even more so with the explosions; trust me, you do not want realistic grenade explosions in this game.)

Background sounds on the whole are of roughly equal quality: rain, wind etc. HD2 doesn't go in as much for having little birdies singing nearby.

As for voices, HD2 has a new feature: all of the characters talk. Sometimes too much, especially considering their very limited repertoire of phrases; you get pretty tired of the endless repetitions of "Enemy sighted!" and the like. Still it adds a bit of atmosphere; the silent teammates in HD were a bit unnerving sometimes.

The voices themselves have a little variety but not enough; you get the same set of voices no matter who your men are, and between this and the short list of stock lines sometimes you wish they had a command for Shut Up.

I can't comment on the music as I turn it off. I'm not interested in making a war movie for God's sake.

HD2 really does some great effects, and not just fires and explosions and cloud formations and other obvious stuff like that. Example: in the second campaign there's a point where you're shooting it out near these airport buildings, and there's a big steel drum, contents unidentified, standing by a hangar. I had just shot a German right next to it, and suddenly I noticed that liquid was squirting out through bullet holes. Now that kind of thing just knocks me on my ass.

The blood splatter is a new/old feature; the original HD had gore, but this was later deleted in the final Deluxe version. I wish it were possible to turn it off; it's not at all realistic - bullet wounds generally don't bleed all that much at first; this is Peckinpah movie gore, and I don't like Peckinpah either - but you get used to it.

The footprints are a cute idea but never really look right and are very distracting; I always turn them off.

The voice commands in Hidden & Dangerous were mostly for atmosphere. They'd respond to Follow Me, after a wandering and spaced-out fashion, and they'd usually halt when you said halt and wait here when you told them to; but that was about it. Hold Fire meant absolutely nothing to them, nor did any other tactical command.

In that respect, HD2 has improved somewhat. They will hold fire when told to - at least most of the time, though if there's a lot going on you have to keep repeating it - and you get a Fire On My Lead command that is very useful in setting up an attack or ambush.

However, they still wander all over the country on Follow Me, sometimes taking off on extended little side trips of their own; and while the new command to Go There (which comes off as "Advance over there," which makes you sound like an asshole) has its uses, the response is always going to be pretty approximate. In HD2 as in HD, if you want a man moved to an even halfway exact location, you have to either take control of him yourself or use the tactical map.

They did add one good idea: you can give commands to move in certain formations - line ahead, abreast etc. - and also, with somewhat less effect, to tighten or loosen up the formation. Of course about half the time when you need this it's not available for some reason, but it's still a good feature.

One of the commands is bugged: Hold Your Positions causes the men to go completely crazy, standing up when they're supposed to be under cover and facing the wrong way. Supposedly the latest patch fixes this, but I just quit using the command, which serves no real purpose anyway.

In some ways the new tactical map is an improvement; you can get a much better picture of what you're trying to do. It's also very difficult to manage; the interface is much too sensitive and isn't set up very well. (The best such interface I've used is the Full Mission Builder 3D viewer in Il-2 Forgotten Battles.) I think they overengineered it; there's something to be said for a simpler approach.

One real complaint: they got rid of a number of very useful commands that the old HD tac map offered. In HD you could not only tell a man to go to a certain point, but also tell him what weapon to use and which direction to point it, and you could even assign him to attack a given target. (Though it's true this last didn't necessarily work all that well; but if you gave him the Guard command in a direction where you expected the enemy, he'd open fire when he saw them.) With HD2 you can't even tell him which way to face when he gets there.

As partial recompense, the new option of selecting mental states - aggressive, defensive or passive - is a very useful one, and seems to work very well.

In this respect both HD and HD2 are bullshit; neither has any serious relationship to the SAS as it actually existed.

HD has one campaign that takes place in a country where the SAS actually operated (Italy) while HD2 has two (North Africa and France) - but then HD2 has more campaigns overall, so the percentage is no better.

(You know you're in trouble when the text on the box says, "From the unforgiving frozen wastes of Norway to the searing heat of the North African deserts, the SAS fought across Africa, Asia, and Europe throughout World War II." Now that is simply a God-damned lie. The SAS never fought in Norway; some SAS teams were sent in to take the surrender of German units in Norway after the war ended, but that was all. And they never fought on the continent of Asia at all until long after World War II.)

However, Hidden & Dangerous in a more basic sense was actually truer to the historic SAS, in that its missions were closer to the sort of thing the real Special Air Service did. Oh, the details were silly as hell; but at least the typical HD mission basically was about shooting people and blowing things up.

Which was what the SAS was all about. It was created for raiding operations - sabotage and hit-and-run attacks - and that was what it did throughout the war. Now and then some damn fool brass hat would use an SAS unit as regular infantry, but that was an aberration. And SAS teams did do some reconnaissance, and on a few occasions rescued Allied agents, but this was a sideline to their primary mission of creating disruption and spreading alarm and despondency behind enemy lines - often with the help of local resistance forces, but sometimes independently.

The SAS certainly was not an intelligence or espionage organization and was not assigned to do things like recover secret documents or track down war criminals. (And let us pass over in embarrassed silence the frogman nonsense.)

So in this sense HD2 actually is even more historically inauthentic than HD. I really wish they had dropped the whole SAS business and created a fictional unit - call it "Alpha Force" or "Special Operations Commando" or something - and in my own mind that is what I do when playing either game. But I suppose it was thought that the SAS label would sell more copies. Well, maybe it wouldn't have sold as well if they'd left that off - but they'd have been RIGHT, God damn it, and being right is more important than making money. (To be sure there are those who disagree; and they are cordially invited to perform the supreme act of self-esteem.)

I should add here that the new "Sabre Squadron" addon apparently does address this defect to some degree. At least the three settings mentioned - North Africa, France, and Italy or rather Sicily - were definitely historic SAS theaters of operation; and the one mission in the demo is much more the sort of thing the SAS did than most of those in the game itself.

HD2 takes a much faster, more powerful, modern computer setup to run. It will bog down and go slideshow on a rig that would run HD with no problems at all. This is no place to get into technical details (perhaps I'll put up a page on system requirements later on) but suffice it to say that the "minimum requirements" listed on the box are optimistic indeed.

HD2 costs money, and it's very likely you'll wind up spending even more to fix up your computer to run it properly, and then there's the addon.

At present you can get Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe absolutely free, if you're willing to spend a little time downloading it, and it will run on just about any reasonably adequate computer setup; and the package includes all the addon missions.

So on that score, at least, the old game still wins; in fact it's the biggest bargain in the business....

But if you compare HD2 with other contemporary first-person ground-combat games, the price is very competitive. Right now Amazon has HD2 marked clear down to ten bucks; even at full-price retail stores you ought to be able to get it for thirty or so. That's considerably less than the nut on Call of Duty, its nearest competitor; and you get a lot more for your money with HD2, because you can play it over and over, whereas CoD and Medal of Honor are so heavily scripted that once you've played a given mission a time or two you know what to expect - and, because of the first-person-only setup, there's not nearly as much you can do with it.

I've wailed a lot on HD2 for some of its more annoying features, its bugs and its historic and ballistic absurdities and so on. But don't get me wrong; it's still a good and even great game. It's precisely because I admire it so much that I'm so critical. If I thought it was a piece of shit I wouldn't bother going into the details; I would just post a single page reading, "This game is a piece of shit," and then go back to downloading dirty movies.

I won't say everybody should get it; it's not for every player by any means - it takes a certain temperament, possibly a slightly weird one, to really get into this game; it certainly isn't going to do much for the typical bangety-bang arcade-shooter fanboy. It's been called a "thinkshooter" and some people don't like to have to think. (And I don't mean to imply stupidity there, necessarily. I know a very successful and highly intelligent executive in the computer business who tried it and didn't like it because, he said, he plays games to relax and "This is too much like what I have to do all day for a living!")

And there is the hardware issue. This game makes a lot of demands; it requires a modern computer with plenty of memory and a good fast video card. I had to replace mine before it would run properly for me, and I had been playing some very intensive flight sims, some with high-density add-on scenery, with no problems on the card I had. If you don't want to spend the money, or haven't got it to spend, what can I say? There's always HD.

But just considered in its own right, even with the limitations, this is still the greatest first-person tactical military game ever made.

In, of course, my own supremely arrogant opinion.

Which is not humble because it has nothing to be humble about.