Prior to this year's E3 press event in Los Angeles, we hadn't heard anything about Czech studio Illusion Softworks' upcoming sequel, Hidden & Dangerous 2, for a long, long time. But the game has since resurfaced, and we were recently able to get a good, close look at it--and we're glad we did. This intriguing game from the developer of last year's story-driven action game Mafia will let you leap into battle as a soldier in a series of World War II field missions, armed with realistic weapons and supported by a small squad of skilled teammates. You'll also get a bird's-eye tactical view of the action and command your entire squad like in a strategy game--in fact, thanks to the flexible Mafia game engine, you'll be able to switch between first-person shooter, third-person shooter, and tactical strategy game whenever you want.
Like the original game, Hidden & Dangerous 2 will be a World War II shooter that will put you in command of a small squad of highly trained soldiers. You'll be able to assemble strike teams of up to four teammates from a pool of 40 different characters. Each character will have a varying rating in three physical attributes--health, strength, and endurance; these determine each character's maximum health, maximum carrying weight, and how long that character can run (and in a few maps with bodies of water, swim) before becoming winded.
Each operative also has varying levels of training in skills such as first aid, lockpicking, and explosives, though after completing various missions, your troops will be able to improve their abilities. Each soldier is typically equipped with a primary weapon and sidearm, though they can also carry first-aid kits, grenades, and close-combat weapons--exactly how much they can carry is determined by the soldier's strength rating. It's often essential to equip your troops with helmets when going into missions in which you expect to take heavy fire, but these will weigh down your soldiers, as will backpacks that can store additional items and ammunition. If you wish, you can get very specific about exactly which kinds of weapons and items each of your teammates will carry into battle, but if you don't care to, you'll also be able to auto-assign default weapon loadouts for each.
Though the game won't be a realistic simulation of tactical warfare, developer Illusion Softworks apparently procured a sizable set of weapons (decommissioned, of course) and brought them into its studio to help create convincing weapon models and motion-captured animation for the soldiers using them. You'll even find a few realistic nuances when using these weapons, such as how a sniper rifle tends to "drift" slightly to the side along with your character's breathing--and if you happen to get sloppy with your shots and fire your sniper rifle repeatedly, the exertion will cause your character to breathe even more heavily, causing the sniper rifle to drift much more (which makes aiming a precise shot far more difficult) as a result.
The game's single-player campaign will consist of six different campaigns that comprise 23 missions total, and each of these missions can be played in multiplayer as well as single-player. Many of these missions will take place on extremely large maps that will offer multiple objectives that unlock new objectives as you go, similar to the levels in Mafia. The game's maps will take place in a variety of environments, including urban warfare maps in Western Europe, the snowy Alps, the deserts of Northern Africa, and the jungles of Burma.
