So, I got Men of War: Vietnam recently. Since I am a huge Vietnam fan I figured that I would be capable of enjoying Vietnam anything. However, after playing for a few hours, I find myself very frustrated on the first mission. On the first mission you play as a couple of Soviet advisors and a couple NVA and at one point you have to blow up three parked Hueys which are surrounded by obstructions and patrolling enemies. There are six helicopter pilots and unless you kill them all, or blow up all the Hueys while they're grounded, they sprint like champion sprinters to the Hueys, go airborne in less than a minute, and basically kill you.
The scenario as outlined earlier in the level is that some Soviet advisors are riding in vehicles with some NVA in order to provide training at an outpost. However it turns out the outpost has been overrun by US forces and the a huey appears and blows up the convoy. Therefore, the advisors conclude that the only way out of this situation is to 1.) take back the outpost so they can collect RPGs stockpiled there, 2.) find a vehicle to drive back to friendly territory, and 3.) blow up the hueys which are in the middle of the enemy base so they don't simply blow up the escape vehicle.
I don't know why they don't simply leave on foot. Somehow leaving on foot is an irrational longshot alternative to taking an outpost, raiding a base where if you fail to disable three helicopters you die, and then adding insult to injury by leaving using an enemy vehicle.
Also, how historically accurate is this scenario for a game that presents itself as realistic? I've read lots of Vietnam memoirs but never encountered any reference to Soviet advisors directly attacking US installations. When your four guys are raiding the initial outpost or have taken it over, why doesn't that simply trigger a reaction force from the main base, possibly including air support? Given your objectives, why don't the Soviet advisors wait for nightfall instead of opening up on the hueys in broad daylight, since their ultimate goal is simply to escape from the area in the first place? Why are they trying to conduct special forces-type operations with zero intel, zero support, and no real plan for extraction, after having been personally nearly blown up by a huey no less?
I found some aspects of the controls very frustrating. I noticed that if I told someone to switch to RPG and told them to fire on a group of pilots, they would switch back to their rifle or LMG in order to fire on the pilots. The game won't tell you if you have line or sight or not so if you want to coordinate two characters firing RPGs at once at two different targets, a lot of times one guy will fire and the other won't and will instead do nothing.
There doesn't really seem to be a way to coordinate actions, like having two guys in different locations lob grenades at the pilots at once, and there is no function to pause and issue simultaneous commands either, so you end up having one guy lob a grenade at one group of pilots, which telepathy-like triggers immediate sprinting in the other group, thus foiling your plan to grenade the second group at the exact same time.
At first I thought I was doing something wrong but went on YouTube and saw that apparently everyone just saves and reloads numerous times until a really unlikely plan barely manages to succeed. One guy literally left his squad behind and just had one guy make repeated suicide runs hoping to get lucky and reloaded whenever it didn't work out. That's not a strategy game when you are basically in ridiculous situation there's no way to tactically or strategically address.
To me, a game like Men of War Vietnam should be about small unit tactics, historical and setting realism, and good strategies. Somehow they missed the boat this one through questionable scenarios and commands that seemingly make it hard to implement coordinated small-unit tactics.