Outfitting your team with equipment is an especially cumbersome affair, as the game's completely counterintuitive interface forces you to transfer items and ammo to your men individually and with far too many mouse clicks. In fact, this clunky interface invades the entire game, and you'll feel it worst when you realize it takes about five steps to load a saved game, whereas it ought to take one. Although the game does offer an option for the computer to outfit your squad for you automatically, it may just as well be a self-destruct button since this so-called feature results in a game crash more often than not.
That the computer-assisted equipment selection is broken is the first evidence that much is amiss with Hidden & Dangerous, whose technical flaws are manifest in countless ways. There's little question, for instance, that the game's artificial intelligence has serious problems. Setting point-A-to-point-B waypoints for your troops oftentimes results in their frolicking all about the map as though it were a Family Circus cartoon rather than a Nazi internment camp. Although enemy soldiers are preposterously and unreasonably accurate, they're dumb as rocks otherwise and ignore their dead and fail to work together to stop you. They merely lie in wait or patrol about and do not respond to hostile situations in a convincing fashion. At least they die realistically. And aside from AI and interface problems, the game is chock-full of glitches and crashes and other inconsistencies. Your men perish if they fall so much as three feet. Sometimes they float in the air, or their weapons vanish, or texture maps drop out. And the camera goes wild, the game crashes whenever, and so on. You shouldn't have to put up with problems like these, especially within what's essentially a good game.
Yet such flaws can be tolerable if you choose for them to be. The fact is this game looks good and its missions are big, unique, and complicated, even as the tension continues to mount with each one. Hidden & Dangerous is the only convincing World War II tactical combat simulation out there, and it can be an immensely satisfying experience during those rare times that you successfully coordinate your men to achieve one of the game's multifaceted objectives. Ultimately, if its premise appeals to you, then Hidden & Dangerous is worth all the effort it takes to play. At the same time, you'll feel frustrated that it isn't perfect, since it comes so close in so many different ways.
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