I was pretty excited about the announced addon for HD2 - if a little bemused by the title: Sabre Squadron? I still haven't figured out what Korean War air combat has to do with HD2; but never mind....
But I wasn't quite ready to spend the money without knowing more; and so when I saw that there was a demo available, I set about trying to download it. The first couple of tries were unsuccessful - it's quite a big download and it kept getting corrupted - but I persevered, because I really wanted to try this out.
What had me going was the announcement that the addon would include missions from Italy, North Africa, and France. Italy was a major field of operations for the SAS, and it was a great mistake to leave it out of HD2. (It was after all represented in the original HD, if somewhat fancifully.) The game has only one mission set in France - unless you count that piece of shit on Fantasy Island - and it's so good I've wished all along that there were more; and as for North Africa, while HD2 does have one pretty good campaign there another one certainly would be good to have. For sure the game needed more campaigns in historically authentic theaters.
Eventually I succeeded in getting a clean download, and installed it and started it up. It certainly looked good; the setup and the menus and so on were the good old familiar HD2 style, they hadn't mucked about with any of that.
(And say this up front, in simple justice: the demo worked perfectly well, right up to HD2 standards. I throw that in because a hell of a lot of these download demos don't work worth a damn.)
It differed from a regular game, in fact, in only a single detail: it contained only one mission. I believe that was true of the demo for HD2, too; someone told me it had the French street fighting mission, and if so this was a real best-foot-forward choice since this was one of the very best missions in HD2. And so I figured they probably picked one of the best ones in the addon package for this demo, so I was pretty hot to play it.
Especially when I listened to the briefing. This, I thought, was more like it; finally a real SAS mission - blow up a bridge. At last somebody was trying to get it right.
It looked pretty good, too, when it started. The terrain was quite well done - pretty simple, but nothing wrong with that - and the buildings looked Italian to me. (Though I've never been as far south as Sicily.)
In fact I was already thinking about where I was going to buy this thing - order it from Amazon, or what? That's how sold I was.
Son of a bitch.
It seemed all right at first. I did get an unpleasant moment when I gave the lads a couple of commands and got cheerful and irritating replies - "Consider it done," for God's sake, and one of these assholes thinks my name is Roger, he must have wandered in from CFS2 - but then I figured oh well, what the hell, I wish they hadn't put that in but I can stand it. Maybe I can find some way to disable the voices, as I did in Forgotten Battles.
And the initial combat went pretty well, a brisk little exchange that left the other side a bit short handed; I'd brought a Bren along this time and it did some good work, even though they botched it pretty badly. (The Bren was noted for its accuracy; the one in the game couldn't hit a mammoth in the ass across a parking lot - but that was in the original game, you can't blame the addon.) So I was feeling pretty good about all this.
Then when things had gotten a bit quieter I stationed the men in good positions and went walking around to check out the place and, especially, the other British troops who were already on the scene - deployed idiotically, in suicidal positions, so there wasn't much time to check them out before they got shot but I managed. Supposedly these were SAS too, though they all wore the red beret of the Parachute Regiment. I was interested in a new feature: you could walk up to these guys and take command of them and add them to your team or at least order them around in simple ways. That seemed to have possibilities.
That was when things started to go to shit.
Believe it or not, these British soldiers in their natty red berets were armed with American weapons. Not just Thompsons, which would have been correct, or the carbine, which the SAS used and loved although I'm not sure they had it by the time of the Sicilian landings. They didn't have either of these, in fact.
No, they were blazing away with, I swear I'm not making this up, M-1 Garands - with one clown operating a BAR.
The machine gunner had a Browning, too. OK, HD2 didn't model the Vickers; but the game certainly had the Enfield and the Bren - so why were my boys the only ones present who were carrying them?
The one and only British-made weapon in evidence was, for the love of bleeding Jesus, a De Lisle carbine. Which didn't even exist, except in trial form, in 1943, and which in any case would never have been issued for this sort of operation.
I walked around some more, ignoring the shooting, and confirmed the bizarre weapons situation. I couldn't believe it. I mean, maybe you could rationalize a single M-1 in an outfit like that - say the guy picked it up off a dead American or something - but a whole unit armed with Garands? Why not Star Trek phasers, then?
I shook my head and restarted the mission - the first start had just been for a lookaround - and set to trying to run it, and things just got worse and worse. Admittedly there was nothing quite as horrible as the Garand-armed Tommies, but plenty else was wrong:
(1) They've mucked up the faces somehow. I was using men I've used again and again in HD2; I'm telling you, I know these guys, better than I know a lot of allegedly real people, I'd recognize them if I met them on the street. And the faces were totally wrong. Carlyle for example has a very distinctive face; this wasn't him, didn't look a bit like him, even had a mustache whereas Carlyle is always clean-shaven. (I used to wonder how he did it in the desert.) Mallory also has a very recognizable face, rather unpleasant in fact, looks like a mean son of a bitch; he'd been replaced by some sharp-faced joker with another mustache. Hendry, who does wear facial foliage, was clean-shaven and likewise unrecognizable; Jackoffski had grown a beard and a smaller nose.
What the hell? There's no excuse for this. It ruins the continuity with the full game, as well as one of HD2's most appealing features: the distinctive, recognizable faces that gave the characters personality and made you feel these were people you actually knew. This cannot be anything but simple sloppy workmanship. For which I am disinclined to pay.
(2) The opposition in this mission was Italian, which is OK; but they were carrying German weapons, which isn't. I put up with that shit in HD2, in the airfield attack mission, because it was just for the one mission - I figured what the hell, it's not realistic to expect them to create a whole set of weapons, Carcano rifles and Beretta submachine guns and pistols, Breda machine guns etc., for a single mission. (Though this charitable attitude took a major shift when I saw those Russian guns lying around in the last minutes of the final mission, in which there was never any excuse for bringing the Soviets in at all.)
But this is an addon, and in an addon you expect to get some new stuff. As in fact you do get in this one; at least there's now a PaK antitank gun - a piece of shit, and I'll get to that in a minute, but still it's a new weapon that you get to use. Besides, this is a whole campaign set in Italy, or rather Sicily; surely that warrants making appropriate weapons. After all, they provided correct Japanese small arms for a two-mission campaign in HD2.
The Italians had some very interesting and generally excellent small arms in World War II (one of them later killed a US President, you might recall) and I'd have liked a chance to use them in this game. Failing that, then they should have just made the enemy Germans.
(3) There are a couple of PaK 40 75mm. antitank guns, which figure prominently in this mission; it's not only possible to operate them, but necessary. Why they are where they are, instead of over on the other side of the ravine, is a mystery; but anyway there they are. There's been some talk about these new weapons that you get to use.
And they are, as previously noted, pieces of shit. They have no sights, so they have to be pointed like shotguns; it's not really difficult to do this, once you get the hang of it you can hit a target pretty well (I was using leftover rounds to snipe individual riflemen at one point), but it's not very damn realistic, is it? An antitank gun without a proper telescopic sight? Come on. How hard would it have been to provide some sort of scope sight picture? They could simply have used the one from the tanks in HD2.
(The gun itself has what is obviously supposed to be a sight; if you watch from the viewpoint of another man, you can see your "gunner" peering through it. But shift to his viewpoint and there's nothing. The shield also becomes somehow invisible.)
This remarkable artillery piece also seems to have the ability to load itself automatically. I suppose it would be a lot to expect to have any sort of simulation of loading a shell into the breech, but it certainly doesn't help the immersion when you've got something this unrealistic.
(3B) They've adopted a really STUPID trick that you find in a lot of games nowadays and that always makes me want to kick somebody in the crotch: the Projectile's Eye View. Actually not quite; you don't, thank you Jesus for small mercies, get that rushing-toward-the-target effect that you have in for example LOMAC. But you do, as you fire the cannon, suddenly get a dizzyingly fast zoom in to a closeup as the shell strikes and explodes. This is just so God-damned corny it makes my teeth curl up. It certainly destroys any immersion you might have managed to develop; even if you succeed in ignoring the Garands and the other goofy shit, the first time you touch off that PaK you get the message right in your face: HI! YOU'RE A DORKY ASS GROWN MAN PLAYING A LITTLE KID PRETEND GAME!
(4) Actually this might have been lumped with the complaints about the AT guns; anyway there is a Tiger Mark I that shows up later in the game and it cannot be damaged by a 75mm. armor piercing round. Now this is just bogus as hell. The PaK 40 was a very powerful gun - one of the best in the world at the time - and while it might have had trouble penetrating the frontal armor of a Tiger Mark I, it certainly could have destroyed or at least disabled it with a hit from the side. (German figures show the PaK 40 as capable of penetrating 100mm. of armor; the Tiger's heaviest armor, on the front, was 102mm. thick, and elsewhere it was considerably thinner.) Not, however, in the wonderful world of Sabre Squadron. There's no doubt about it; thanks to the aforementioned insta-zoom feature, you can see the round explode harmlessly against the side of the Tiger's hull, not even scratching the paint.
Of course the same Tiger is dead meat for an early-type American bazooka - which in Korea proved incapable of destroying an ordinary Soviet-made T-34, a much more lightly armored tank than the Tiger - but by the time you get to that point you've already given up expecting anything to make sense, either historically or logically.
This amazing tank also totally destroys a large stone bridge with a single 88mm. shell. Really I cannot understand how the Axis powers lost with this kind of technology at their disposal.
(5) The other British troops on the scene - the boys with the Garands and the BAR and the Browning and probably a Jivaro poison-dart blowgun somewhere as well - are weird in another way. Weird hell, they're insane. Crazy as a box of bats. They stand around shouting out all these exclamations and at first it adds a bit of atmosphere - but atmosphere is all it is; none of it means anything whatever, and if you pay any attention to their shouts of "Look out! He's trying to get around us on the right!" you'll wind up as crazy as they are.
And they keep on doing it, even after they're lying on the ground helplessly wounded; they shout out stuff like, "I need ammunition!" and "There's a sniper!" Poor bastards, delirious with pain? Nah. They're simply crazy. You'll find out, if you get to them before they get hit; they do it even when they're uninjured.
Much worse, the apparently valuable feature of being able to take command of them and add them to your team turns out to be largely worthless, because it doesn't seem to be possible to persuade them to fire at the enemy. We had this one whackjob that we rescued from an impossible position and moved up to join us (took away his damn Garand and gave him an Enfield, too) and through a series of engagements, while everybody else was blazing desperately away, he hunkered there holding his rifle and shouting irrelevancies like, "I need ammunition!" (He didn't; we'd given him several clips, none of which he ever used.)
Not that they're totally useless. I finally got tired of listening to our pickup boy and used the tac map to run him across the bridge, to see who shot at him and where they were located. Got him killed of course, but hey, he was hopelessly psycho and we weren't running a mental ward....
Point is, the AIs for the other British troops are buggy or just defective; somebody had a good idea, no doubt about it, but they botched the job. I'll give them points for trying something, but in the process they created a real pain in the ass.
(6) The Italians fight with courage, determination, and skill. Woo. Getting Politically Incorrect now, are we? Yeah. I can't help it; the historic record is beyond dispute - Italians have fought very bravely and well at various times and places (the present Iraq war for one) but they damn well didn't in World War II, with a few isolated exceptions. HD2 reflects this pretty well - the one mission they figure in, they fight incompetently and surrender with great enthusiasm - but no doubt somebody complained. Just as somebody is sure to complain about my saying this. Il Tuffo Shitto, paisan, I call 'em the way I see 'em.
Well, I could go on, but why bother? Some of these things I could maybe live with; maybe I could find a way to live with all of them, if I really tried, but I don't want to. The whole thing offends me. Not just because of the ghastly Weird History, but because it's so obvious that they were trying to imitate other successful games and to suck up to the US market. The original Hidden & Dangerous contained a hell of a lot of errors, but it had its own integrity. HD2 has some bad points, but on the whole it's got integrity too, if of a weaker sort. Sabre Squadron, if this mission is any example - and I have to assume it is, why else choose it for the demo? - has little or none.
This is where some fanboy always says, "But hey, it's just a game!" I know. It is indeed; and that's just it. It could have been something more.
I'll probably go on playing with this damn thing; I've run the mission once all the way through - it's not terribly hard once you understand how it works - but I'm not satisfied with the way I ran it and I know I can do better. Hell, maybe I'll post some screenshots, even a walkthrough, one of these days.
But at present at least I have no intention of buying it and I can't recommend that anyone else do so.
Now if you think I'm being unfair in making a judgment based only on the demo, if you think I should try the full addon before forming an opinion, why, you just buy me a copy and send it to me in the mail and I'll be happy to give it a try and if I conclude that I was wrong I'll remove this page and write up another one.
Until then, I give Sabre Squadron a thumbs down and the designers a middle finger up.