Personnaly, I find the game system very old school - I move, I shoot, you move, you shoot - sort of stuff. It is not WW2 40K or anything like that. It is a 'gamesworkshop' style product from a marketing point of view. In this I mean very simple 'bucket of dice' game system, a base rule book that is 50% colour photos and other fluff and the requirement to buy expansion after expansion each month just to get data on what, IMHO, should have been in the core rules in the first place.

The rules are also set out with that GW style 'special rules' for each army with stuff like Russians getting human wave attacks, British getting stiff upper lips and Yanks getting to bomb their own side with air support. While in some ways this is nice as it gives each nation their own special 'feel', it is also reinforcing stereotypes. The other 'annoyance' with these sort of special rules is that once you buy the expansion set and get another set of special rules for your army, you can then play this rule on someone else who has not seen the expansion and has been playing the core rules in good faith.

This 'super army of the week' sort of thing was what GW used to do with their Warhammer FB lists and managed to completely piss off the Warhammer gamers in our groups so much that they stopped playing.

While I am bitching about the expansions, does there have to be so many? As I understand it the first release is for German Paras and contains rules (which were not in the core rules) for para and glider landings. (Actually it contains about 20 pages of new rules and scenarios and about 30 pages of pretty pictures of how wonderful their painting skills are and 2 cardboard german gliders. A serious style over substance if you ask me)

Why couldn't the para rules be in the core rules instead of padding it out with 10,000 words of bad fiction about Sargent Major Smith and his tommy gun? Or why couldn't there be just one para expansion with all nations' airborne forces covered in one book?

Other things that annoy me is the barely hidden 'buy our figures' sales pitch in the rules. Stuff like 'flak 18 models based with 8 or more figures get a ROF bonus' (buy more crew packs), 'we reduced the firing ranges of indirect fire artillery because we like to see the gun models on the table' (buy more 25pdr packs), the listing of the Battlefront pack codes in the army lists (buy our packs, not theirs) and the 'in case of a tied dice roll the Battlefront model always wins over any over brand' (okay I made that bit up :p)

Another thing, and I will confess that this may just have been because there is a general lack of terrain on the table, but the game looks like a lot of 7yrsWar linear tactics plus tanks.

I think if you just want to put your WW2 stuff on the table and roll a bunch of dice you will enjoy these rules. In our group it seems to have split us. Half of us think it is great fun and really simple and the other half think it is really simple, old school, overpriced and a kiddies game. Personally I will be playing 15mm using the Fire and Fury WW2 rules instead.