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.