What I was hoping for and expecting, was a more detailed and squad-oriented Company of Heroes like game. What I have found is just another rushy rush RTS, with a lot of pretty unnecessary details and clumsy controls over your units and camera, making those details (like ammo distribution between individual soldiers) just another hindrance to the player, to make it more challenging to fight pretty mindless enemies.

I have a very specific point of view, that of a player of RTS games with active pause. MoW:AS is highly not recommended from this perspective. I understand, that my concerns may not be important for many typical RTS players, but as they are seemingly recommending the game without taking those issues into the account, I think it’s fair, to balance the things with my not recommended point of view.

For me there are 2 main things, that make it hardly playable.
First is the fact, that in spite of the whole Men of War franchise being listed as having active pause at RTS active pause list , the feature is broken in this game. When you pause, you may be able or not able to successfully select a unit, but most often for it’s orders to show up (though not always) you need to restart the game (which then you can pause again)… and still those orders given during the pause the unit may forget. The whole experience is simply to messy and at times unpredictable.
Second, even more particular, but very annoying problem is moving my camera around the battlefield. Right-clicking minimap is often just not precise enough for me, and moving it by placing the cursor at screen edge is largely broken for multiple side-by-side display setup.

Another issue is the terrible AI. Out of multiple cases of simply idiotic behavior of different soldiers let me mention just one. I had a mortar crew, that I pushed into an entrenchment too far ahead, willing to sacrifice it, if necessary. They did their job, but indeed got cut off. At some point a lone Jap has jumped into the entrenchment just next to them. They just still kept firing their mortar at far targets, not taking any attempt on their own to defend themselves with their personal weapons. He killed one of them, further away… and then he just cohabited the entrenchment with the other mortarman. My mortarman was still shooting his mortar, and the Jap was firing his rifle at faraway soldiers for quite a while, before he finally got killed.
This terrible AI unfortunately applies as well to they way in which your troops carry your orders. If you order a 6 men squad into a trench, usually you are able to do it in such way, that just one soldier will decide to lie outside of the trench. But trying to order an 8 men squad to take cover behind 4 large rocks a meter or 2 apart, usually half of the men will take position between those rocks.

Even if the manual provided seems to cover most basics (but not much more), the game suffers from lack of tutorial.

Last and not least, it has been shamelessly abandoned by it’s devs and publisher. The servers are down since the GameSpy closed, but the devs “forgot” to mention it on the game’s Steam page (even though they have promised to do so in a forum post). On their forum they used to have links to “Men of War: Assault Squad Combat Guide” in 5 parts, but for at least 4 years those links are dead, and 4 out of 5 parts of the guide are nowhere to be found.

My personal rating 3/10.