We can’t find one, but if there was a ‘Complete Idiot’s Guide To Making Commercial Videogames’, we think it would break the process down into rudimentary parts that would read something like this. Decide on a genre that’s popular, like first-person shooters. Decide on a subject that’s popular too – World War II is a safe bet. World War II FPSs are very common, though, so add a feature to yours that makes it distinctive. Then make sure you launch it on a powerful and popular console, such as the 360, that’s capable of handling all the latest technological features like ragdoll physics and hidef graphics. Et voilà: you’ve made a videogame! It’s as easy as that.

N-Fusion seems to have opted for the cheaper volume, and here’s how this reads: Your priorities lie in convincing the buying public that your generic World War II game is of similar quality to others on the market, so it must have a title that reminds them of good World War II games. Think Call OF Duty and Medal OF Honor. Slap suitable imagery on the cover – soldiers in battle, bullets, explosions – you know the score. Then compare the game to epic films such as The Dirty Dozen and watch the sales roll in. Gameplay experience is strictly secondary to all of this; just get the product out there in time and hope it works and plays reasonably well too.

Hour Of Victory ticks all these boxes, but fails to even attempt to satisfy the gamer in any way. Our experience of it was a tissue of frustration, incredulity and hilarity throughout. The concept itself that underpins the game and is supposed to lend it some originality is downright stupidly implemented. For example, the Commando is strong, and can shift heavy objects, but the others can’t. Fair enough, kinda, but why is it that only the SAS guy can climb ropes or scale walls? Why can’t the sniper or the Commando shoot the damn padlocks off? Or the SAS specialist, for that matter, does he have to go to all that effort of picking the thing? It’s a gimmicky feature cheapened by the fact that you can, quite literally ditch your role completely. Both the sniper and the stealth specialist can drop their respective rifle and silenced MP40, pick up a Bren and run and gun. In fact, this is the only realistic way of surviving in some scenarios, the very notion of stealth or sniping being made absolutely ridiculous in the thick of an urban assault on a Nazi bunker.

But it gets worse, far worse. It’s bad enough that the graphical quality is sub-par, even in 1080i, but the ragdoll physics, object interactivity, control system, AI… everything, in fact, is either bugged or a testament to a game that lacks any imagination or creativity. A euphemistic way of putting it would be to describe Hour Of Victory as an anachronism – much of the technology used would have been cool and interesting ten years ago. Today it’s too broken to even be considered blasé. Dead soldiers collapse and fall unnaturally, thrashing away for minutes after, knives bounce off enemies and, apart from the odd bullet hole, crater and (oddly enough) soldier helmets, there’s virtually zero destructibility that hasn’t been scripted.

The AI is laughably bad; even when the alert is raised and their brothers in arms are falling down around them in plain sight, soldiers will often wait patiently until you either shoot at them or cross an imaginary threshold before they’re stirred into action. It’s as if NFusion was blind to any evolution in FPS AI beyond Doom. Actually, it’s worse than that, at least in Doom your foes made a beeline for you once roused; here they opt to jog casually over to the nearest bunker before turning their guns on you, regardless of how exposed it leaves them. The biggest thorn in our side, though, was the control system; broken beyond belief with snipering crippled by a painfully slow scroll speed, the worst auto-aim feature in the world and context-specific buttons that constantly perform the wrong action at the most inopportune moment.

We bet you think you’ve heard the worst that we can possibly report on this game, but here’s the real kicker: Hour Of Victory is a 360 exclusive, which means N-Fusion has devoted development of this game to one platform – you hear what we’re saying? Not that the greater time and resource constraints involved in a multiformat project would be much excuse for this transparently commercial pap anyway. Hour Of Victory isn’t just bad for a ‘next-gen’ game, or even for consoles of the last generation, it’s just all-round rubbish, ill-conceived, bland, broken and boring. And on that rather alliterative and damning note, we’ll sign ourselves off.

Ben Biggs