Civil War Secret Missions is the latest title in the ongoing History channel series of shooters. In this title you go through various battles and situations that took place during the civil war. On some missions you are fighting for the Confederacy while on other missions you are fighting for the Union. While you are getting briefed for whatever mission you are about to embark on you will listen to a narrator explain what is going on and what you hope to accomplish on the mission. You get to look at photographs from that era which I’m sure is where the partnership with the History Channel really helps out. Going through the game you will also find pictures of some of the more famous people from the Civil War as well as letters written by soldiers addressed to loved ones.

As soon as you start the game you will immediately notice that using weapons from the Civil War era is not a whole lot of fun. While I congratulate the developers on the accuracy of the weapons, it got really old when my character had to reload my sniper rifle after every shot. The controls themselves are fairly standard, however, they aren’t as responsive as they should be. They felt a little too clunky for me at times. The hit detection in the game also seems to be a bit off at times. I would line someone up in my sights using my sniper rifle yet somehow, at times, the bullet still wouldn’t hit them. It quickly became annoying especially given that some of the achievements in the game deal with how accurate of a shooter you are in any given level. The animations in this game are also pretty poor. Towards the end of the game this is easily noticeable when you see a bunch of your troops charging on a battlefield and as you watch them get shot the animation of them keeling over is stilted.

As I eluded to before there isn’t much of a story in this game. You get a little back story before each mission however that is really all you are going to get. When you eventually beat the game you don’t even get to see an ending. As soon as you beat the last level you are immediately kicked out to the main menu. There is no ending and not even any credits. While we all know how the Civil War turned out it would have been nice to see at least a video of the end of the war as a reward for going through the title. Space on the disc wasn’t an issue as after I installed it to my hard drive I noticed it only took up a little over three gigabytes. There is also no online play anywhere in this title which definitely hampers the replayability.

Overall it is a decent shooter, however, the developers do need to address all of these problems for future games. The game is fairly generic which is a real shame considering the source material. If you are a Civil War aficionado then I would say to either rent this game or wait until you see it in the bargain bin. You will be able to finish the single player campaign in one sitting as it is only a few hours long. If you don’t really care about the Civil War then just move along and go play a better shooter.

Score: 5/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network