2 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 426.1 hrs on record (151.0 hrs at review time)
Posted: 1 Jun, 2015 @ 4:32pm

TL;DR
Overall good RTS game, comrade, should try.
Pros -
-Nice representation of life on Eastern Front
-Interesting story
-Great gameplay
-Nice blood & gore aspects

Cons -
-Low FPS at times (Sometimes games last so long the map is literally a bunch of craters. Not often, though.)
-At times, gets boring waiting in stalemates
-AI is unpredictable. In a bad way.
-(May be fixed) Campaign progress suddenly wiped...?

You know, I never got around to reviewing this game.
But I absolutely love it. It captures war on the Eastern Front perfectly, allowing you to see how terrible and terrifying the war was by watching soldiers get blown into infamous 'red mist', gunned down by officers for retreating, mass-charges into well-defended positions, begging to fail, and tanks slipping through ice. But at the same time, you can also bring a little bit of kindness into the war by saving civilians in the line of fire, rescuing soldiers, etc. There is even an intense mission where you have to take out a TIGER! With only infantry! Not hard but fun and intense. This would be in the campaign. The story is also very interesting, btw.

But your journey won't end there. You can take the fight online in awesome, yet brutal mutliplayer matches or against the AI in co-op missions or 'Comp-Stomp' matches, which are basically normal multiplayer matches but with AI instead of human opponents. Mapmakers also make epic maps for this game that blend very well with either the theme of the Western Front pack, such as the endless D-Day maps, or remakes of the large-scale fighting in both cityscape and countryside on the Eastern Front. There are so many maps to choose from, I wouldn't be surprised one bit to find that nearly every single engagement of the war in Europe is covered by some map.

And finally, the editor. The editor for this game is extremely simple. I have zero coding or mapmaking knowledge and I actually managed to make a couple ok maps. Not the best, mind you, but I'm sure you could find somebody else who is worse than me. Anyway, the editor has a few great guides on Youtube and in the guides section of the community, allowing for an even easier time using the editor. I'll admit, it wasn't the easiest for me to learn how to use, but I don't have alot of experience using editors for games, so I'm not really familiar with alot of the different formats of interface.

What about cons, you ask?
Well, one con of this game is, for whatever reason, my game would occassionally reset campaign save data. I could be on like mission 10 and after not playing for about 5 days, I'd not have any save data at all, and it was very frustrating having to play the same missions like 20 times. This could be fixed though, I don't know, I haven't really checked.
Another con would be that, well, sometimes teams in multiplayer would be so stalemated it just killed the game. It happened rarely but often enough that it was really annoying. I can't count the amount of games where nobody ever captured a single victory point the entire game, all the way up to the end.
Ok, so next up is unpredictable AI. There are plenty of times where the AI will be a complete idiot one game, and completely ignore repairing extremely important bridges needed to cross a map, but other times where, nomatter how hard you tried, the AI would completely wreck your Tiger I that hasn't even been spotted on the map even once yet, with an ambush of about 5 panzerfausts out of literally nowhere. It's so obvious the AI always knows exactly where all of your units are, regardless of FoW. Also, AI would sometimes ignore bridges that were vital to crossing the map, and other times they'd repair completely useless bridges put in the game for purely aesthetic reasons. I mean, it's mostly probably due to custom map design, but still. Very annoying to see AI go for useless bridge instead of Ace Tiger II with like 30 tank kills, hundreds of inf kills, and in need of vital repairs ASAP.
Sometimes, if battles prolonged for too long, FPS would tend to drop a bit. Not alot but definitely noticable. This is probably due to alot of detail on maps alongside alot of new 'features' added like firing hundreds of artillery shells at one spot causing an FPS tank as you marched your little horde of infantry and tanks across it.

But all that said, these cons are really mostly just annoyances, and the vast majority of gameplay was fun and engaging. Even a little bit immersive at some points, playing alongside good friends in a co-op game. And those cons are really just things you should expect, though a little bit more prevalent due to the massive amounts of custom maps.
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