DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A 3 D VIDEO CARD. It will not run well without one. It's worth getting a good one for your computer as I suspect that most of the good new games to come out in the future will be 3 Dimensional! This is a very good effort with some pluses and some minuses. We will detail these to help you decide if this game is for you. The overall game system is very different from Panzer General 2 and People's General which use the same basic engine. The 3 D graphics are excellent but a bit slow unless you have at least a Pentium III with 550 mhz which I upgraded to in order to run this game and at least a 24X CD. I now have a 48X which is fast but noisy. Don't bother getting this fast a CD as I'm not that impressed with it.
The game system is based on slots and promotion levels. There are a maximum of 10 promotion levels you can achieve for your leaders. It's all a question or leaders! Each unit MUST have a leader and his promotion level is indicated by the number of stars he has which show up on his picture card. I can not think of a better word and this is what the manual uses. The card will have his picture, biographical nonsense as you will recognize some of the photos as belonging to real leaders, the class of fighting unit he can command and the number of stars or actions of which he is capable. Most leaders in the beginning of a campaign or scenario have 2 to 4 stars. This means they can perform 2 to 4 actions such as move, shoot, entrench etc. Thus a unit with 4 stars can move 1,2,3 or even 4 times in one turn. Infantry and some other units are restricted to 3 moves in a turn. All units with 2 to 4 stars Count one slot. Units with 5 to 7 stars count two slots and 8 to 10 star leaders count three slots. In most campaign scenarios you will receive two slots as reinforcements at some random turn in the scenario. This means you can select and deploy two units with 2 to 4 star leaders or one with 5 to 7 stars.
The initial and some subsequent campaign scenarios will give you a number of units some or all of which are already deployed. These cannot be exchanged for better leaders and units but non-deployed units may be exchanged and this is often a good idea. The start of each scenario will give you 3 to 6 promotions to enhance your leaders. Use them wisely. This will allow you to build your leaders up to the two and three slot level which makes them much more powerful and more mobile. The single scenarios usually only give you three stars to enhance your forces and exchanging units is very important as this is the only chance you'll get to improve the forces the computer dealt you.
There are eight campaigns and a number of single scenarios you can play most of which are included in the campaigns but the single scenarios are more historically correct than the campaigns. There are four shorter campaigns: O'Connor, Kesselring, LeClerc and Patch. These are obviously named for the generals they describe. O'Connor is the tutorial and should be played first. Kesselring is tough and fun, a real challenge to repulse the allies at Anzio and end the war without the powerful leaders you can build in a longer campaign. The four longer campaigns include 13 to 16 scenarios each and are Rommel, Guderian, Patton and Montgomery. Monty is quite good and fairly accurate historically and so is Patton. Rommel and Guderian have lots of historical what ifs that are fun if you like that sort of thing.
This is not a game for the historical purist. He will be disappointed. Exarnples: If the Luftwaffe had this many planes in France in 1944, D-Day might have been a disaster, Elephants turn up repeatedly despite the very limited production which was mostly destroyed at Kursk and the remainder in Italy. The enemy almost always has plenty of aircraft so you must have at least a two slot leader with a powerful air defense unit ASAP unless you want to spend too many slots on fighters. A 2 or 3 slot leader is best expended on bombers, armor, fighters, recon and anti-tank in that order. You need a combined arms force with the aforementioned units and a little infantry usually engineers. Artillery is not nearly as potent as they were in PG2. One self-propelled unit can be useful to take out enemy air defense units or the occasional infantry in the open which is not too frequent. Paratroops are good for mid-game reinforcement as they can move by airdrop as can American Rangers which gives them excellent mobility.
There are 5 levels of difficulty and many plus and minus adjustments that call be made. most of which help quite a bit. Try games with and without the unlimited ammunition bonus to see which you prefer. The computer loves to ambush you and they are sometimes difficult to spot especially in towns and airfields. It also likes to occasionally sneak a unit into your home base if you leave it undefended early in the scenario which results in an instant loss for the home team. Fortunately the program does not handle the enemy aircraft real well or this would really be tough to beat. If you keep your forces together they will fly in to attack usually and you call clobber their fighters with your 88s or whatever.
Try the Gazala, El Alamein and Arnhem single scenarios. I enjoyed them. As you have probably surmised by now there are no Eastern Front scenarios. I hope they come out with such a game using this system. I think it would be fun. All in all, I enjoyed playing thisgame: 4 stars out of 5.
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© Copyright 2000 Hal Thinglum
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