It’s my own fault. For years I’ve been clamoring for a game based on my favorite adventure movie of all time, The Great Escape. What could be more fun, I reasoned, than plotting to escape from a German P.O.W. camp? Well, huzzah, someone actually felt my pain and did it. Sort of. It’s called Prisoner of War, and boy should I have been careful of what I wished for.

This is a third-person action/adventure with an unusual twist: there’s no combat at all. That’s what most intrigued me about the title, actually. “Cool!” I thought, “Thief in a German POW camp!”

This XBox game has you playing as Captain Lewis Stone, an American flyer shot down over Germany during World War II. He’s tossed into a temporary internment camp, one of several prisons in the game.

The first thing you have to do in the camp (and the game) is to get used to the rigid structure of the day. If you don’t show up for morning and evening roll call, for example, you’ll have the entire camp up in arms. And if you are seen in the wrong area of the wrong time, you’ll be accosted by a guard.

Right away you begin talking with your fellow prisoners, to learn the pecking order and to get tips on escape. The first thing you’ll learn about your fellow prisoners is that they are all, uh, BORING guys.

The story is set up in a series of chapters which each have multiple objectives. In this sense the game is quite linear in the way that many adventure games are. You do have some leeway in how to accomplish each objective, but not as much as you might think.

There are many different and interesting tasks you must perform in these missions, from stealing plans from the Commandant’s desk to stealing a crowbar or a guard uniform to sabotaging the camp’s P.A. system. Each task gets you closer to the break from that particular prison.

Sounds like a great setup for a game, right? I mean, except for the boring fellow-prisoners. And yes, it is . . .

. . . BUT.

First of all, and there’s no real nice way to say this, but Prisoner of War is the ugliest XBox game I’ve seen. The XBox is widely praised for its robust graphics capabilities, so why in the world would anyone have the nerve to publish such an unattractive game for this platform? The character models are ugly and the prison environments have a very basic look.

Also, as I mentioned above, the characters and dialog are, let’s see, what’s the word for it? Oh, yeah, DULL. The writers didn’t copy The Great Escape nearly as much as they should. “Captain Lewis Stone” is no Steve McQueen, I’m afraid.

There are all sorts of potentially cool actions you can take while sneaking around. You can mantle over fences, crawl under buildings, hug walls, knock on walls, throw rocks to distract guards, look through keyholes, and other fun-sounding activities.

The problem is that, when it comes to using all of these fun abilities to accomplish your mission objectives, the game is extremely unforgiving. In a given mission you may have to figure out how to get from HERE to THERE, and you begin attempting different plans of action. Sneak behind this hut. Crawl under this building. Crouch behind this gas tank. You know, standard P.O.W. movie stuff.

Much has been made in other reviews of the unrealistic obliviousness of the guards, and that can be true. But despite this, missions tend to fail over and over again as you attempt to figure out how exactly the game wants you to solve a problem. The game is also inconsistent – “Okay, I can stand here now and no one sees me, even though there’s a guard five feet away . . . but if I stand HERE I get caught immediately.” Unlike other good stealth games, you never really know where you stand, and this leads to much player frustration.

This is a real problem for a game released in 2002. Games like Thief, Deus Ex, and many others have raised the bar on stealth action games, so that this kind of rigidity is really unacceptable now.

What turns this frustration into a real game-killer, however, is that most hackneyed and outdated console game convention, The Limited Save. In Prisoner of War, you can only save while safe in your bunk. This means there is no such thing as an in-mission save. Let me clear my throat and say this so everyone can hear me: HAVING NO IN-MISSION SAVES IN GAMES IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. PERIOD. Another recent stealth game, the sequel Hitman 2, has acknowledged this problem that it had in its original installment and has fixed the problem. Codemasters should have as well.

After stumbling through your seventeenth attempt to snag that guard’s uniform, having successfully made it over the first fence, the first door, the second fence, past the third guard, down the first hallway, out the second door, and into the final room and coming within a nano-angstrom of success, then getting caught and having to do the entire mission over – well, it’s just not fun after a very little while.

After a few missions you glumly realize that you couldn’t care less whether this boring soldier rots in prison for the rest of the war.

What’s even more puzzling about the lackluster, ho-hum nature of the gameplay is that this is the same game studio that came up with the much-celebrated Operation Flashpoint and its expansions.

Prisoner of War is a game with a truly terrific idea. It’s just scuttled by mediocre execution.

Final Grade: C-

System Requirements:

Xbox:

• Xbox
• controller

  PC:

• PIII 500 or equivalent
• 128 MB RAM
• 8X CD-ROM
• 3D Accelerator
• 16MB VRAM
• sound card
• DirectX v8.1

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.