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Product summary
World War II has been done before and done better, but it's never been done like this.
Specifications: Genre: Action; Number of players: 1-16 Players See full specs
Gamespot editors' review
- Reviewed on: 09/29/2008
- Released on: 07/22/2008
In World War II games, not all Germans are bad. As ubersoldier Karl Stolz in the appropriately named UberSoldier II, you lead the German underground resistance against a dying Nazi regime with its back against a wall. With Soviet and Allied forces closing in on Berlin, the remaining Nazi leaders have fled to a secret base in Tibet to plan a devastating counterstrike. Outmanned and outgunned, only you can save the world from...oh, you know the rest. While UberSoldier II's story is so nonsensical and outrageous that you will openly laugh at--not with--the game during almost every cutscene, some fun gameplay twists and a bargain price make this shooter worth a look.
Use the time shield to queue up a head shot or two... or seven.
Initially, you're not all that uber, and the game immediately comes off as just another generic World War II shooter. Where UberSoldier II finally grabs you is at the end of the first level, where you can distribute experience points in a simplistic role-playing game upgrade system; there, you'll slowly transform Karl into a supernatural force of destruction. For reasons revealed in the original UberSoldier, Karl has several supernatural talents, such as the ability to deploy a time shield, a bubble of energy that surrounds his body and freezes all incoming and outgoing bullets in midair. A self-charging energy meter powers the shield and acts as your stamina when sprinting. This shield can be upgraded with experience points so that you can fire all bullets back toward your enemies. This means that you can fire a bullet into your own shield, where it will wait in stasis until an enemy pops out his fascist little head, and then turn off the shield to score a headshot. Additionally, because any frozen bullets that make contact with enemies are deadly, you can use the bullets as a form of melee attack by running at your opponents.
Balancing the shield use with Karl's other supernatural abilities, Ubersniper and Berserker, is the key to success in UberSoldier II. By scoring four headshots over a brief time period, you trigger Ubersniper and replenish your health. Ubersniper is slow-motion bullet time, and enemies and items such as health packs are brightly colored and more visible. If you make four consecutive knife kills, you trigger Berserker mode, in which you are invincible and slowly replenish your health with each successive knife kill. The key is that each series of three consecutive headshots or knife kills rewards you with experience points. There's no limit to how many you can earn in one level, so the game becomes a balancing act of survival by killing enemies, or earning XP by killing them in style. Your time shield allows you to get in close for knife kills, or queue up eventual headshots. You can still play UberSoldier II as a straight-up shooter, lobbing grenades and taking cover while unloading the contents of your MG42 into enemies--but you'll die a lot and won't have nearly as much fun.
After each mission, you spend XP on increasing your health, energy, accuracy, emotion time (the duration of Berserker and Ubersniper), and stasis shield. UberSoldier II starts off fairly easy if you're using your shield effectively, but the difficulty ramps up quickly. If you don't work for headshots and knife kills, your UberSoldier will never reach the required level of uberness to deal with the deadly, 10-foot-tall, rocket-launcher-wielding Ubermacht supersoldiers found deep within Tibet in later missions. Because you earn XP yourself, rather than being rewarded a set amount after finishing a mission, UberSoldier II's upgrade system is rewarding and quite addictive. It's a shame, then, that developer Burut Creative Team failed to build an immersive or engaging game around its unique mechanics.
"The end will be quick and beautiful like the touch of an angel."
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