The intro movie of POW lets you know what you're in for. A incredibly low-grade cinema sequence introduces you to the game as your character, Captain Lewis Stone and his co-pilot are flying a recon mission over Nazi-occupied territory. The graphics in this intro film are so bad that you'll think they were some kind of a sick joke on the developers' part. And it just gets worse.

Your plane is shot down and you end up captured by the Germans. You're immediately brought to a small prison camp and locked down. Here, the one-dimensional characters appear to either assist you, or make your life miserable. The camp Kommandant is probably the worst character of all. The voice acting is so laughable and stereotyped, I almost stopped the game right there. All the Germans sound as if one drunken English speaker was hired to do all their voices. At best they sound like Colonel Clink. If that was the voice actor's goal, he succeeded, if he was shooting for realistic German accents, he failed miserably.

The voice acting for the "good guys" isn't much better. The British and Irish characters all sound cheesy and the Americans frequently end up sounding like teen agers who just left the skate park.

Graphically Prisoner of War is passable, but it really should have been a lot better. Characters range from blocky to cartoonish. Mouths don't sync up with speech all that often and the artists' attempts at giving characters facial features are less than stellar. The Germans of course have five o'clock shadows which look like dark gray paint slapped across their jawlines. Allied characters tend to have long heads and goofy flat faces. Any quality graphics appear in the environments themselves, which range from basic prison camps with small buildings to elaborate castle prisons The levels are well laid out with plenty of room to explore or sit around in while you gather your thoughts.

While POW loses a lot of appeal in the graphics department, it gains points in the depth department. I have to admit, however, the first level was infuriatingly dull. You arrive at the camp, start talking with the other prisioners and pick up some small missions. All the while you're waiting for time to pass so you can actually try to complete the missions you're given. The developers were kind enough to give you the ability to accelerate time, which lets you jump from day to evening with a few button clicks. Once you survive the first level's tedium, you'll find the other levels a bit more interesting, with you sneaking around disguised as German guards, climbing castle walls and sabotaging German weaponry bound for attacks on the Allies.

With the added depth of gameplay the levels provide, you would think the game would become more enjoyable. If you're like me, however, it's just not enough. Each level consists of pretty much the same thing in a different guise; talking to someone to get info or a new mission, completing that mission, then getting through to the main mission. While one mission may have more depth than the other, it's still just 'click click click' your way around. Duck here, run there, climb here, find this, retrieve that. That's what it comes down to unfortunately and it doesn't take a ton of brainpower to complete the levels, just patience and the sheer willpower to complete a level before falling asleep. Speaking of sleeping, any time you need to save the game, you just return to your bunk and your game is saved. An easy way to ensure you don't screw up, but it makes it a little too easy to try stupid things and see if you can get away with it.

Most of POW is spent sneaking around in the crouched position or behind cover. The German guards have a specific field of vision/hearing that you have to be careful not to cross. If a guard does detect you, you can either run for it , with the odds of getting away being slightly more than zero, or you can duck and hide. Providing there's some cover around in the form of a tree, building or shadow,your duck and hide routine will probably be more than enough to prevent discovery. During one level, I even hid behind a flagpole with three guards facing me and they couldn't see me. I would like to think that any guard worth his salt would be able to spot a 180 lbs. man in a US Air Force uniform crouched behind a flagpole, but perhaps I expect too much. Anyhow, you'll spend 99% of this game crouched or crawling through levels, so get ready for some long play times.

Both the sound and controls in the game are pretty good with the previously mentioned exception of the voice acting. Footsteps, creaking doors, tapping on walls, it all sounds pretty true-to-life which helps to make the game a bit more enjoyable. As far as the controller is concerned, it is set up to make it easy to move around and  interact with other characters (you choose your conversation topics from a menu) all while ducking and dodging the German guards.

Overall, POW is a passable game in my book. I don't think it's awful by any means, but it could have used a lot more work in the graphics and voice department before being released. Especially for a game that's using the ultra-powerful Xbox graphics processor. The designers also should have spent more time on creating some depth to the game, as the "click and talk" and "go run hide" nature of the game gets tiresome after awhile.  If you're a real WWII fanatic who loves a bit of a brain teaser, this game is a good rental, for anyone else, skip it.

See screens and movies on the POW media page