Instead of the usual 'two factions battling over control for a planet', you get to play as the Russians, German, French, American or British, even recreating historical scenarios such as D-Day and Stalingrad. So there's no need to mess about with bases, sending collectors to mine resources and 'spewing out' soldiers as if they were green plastic toys on a production line. The game will provide the depth to freely explore as many tactical avenues as your imagination allows. In the way of turn-based affairs such as Close Combat, Sudden Strike has you concentrating strictly on the strategic side of things. Apart from the expendable human resources, of course. The amount of detail is just staggering: barricades are wound in spiked wire, the trees come in a variety of types and sizes, you can spot lazy soldiers having a smoke and almost make out the jagged edges of the planks used in the construction of the houses.Īnd, thank god, there's no resource management.
It's not that I have an unhealthy fascination with WWII, but seeing a massive landscape covered with soldiers, crawling with tanks, with bridges, woods and villages providing more than just a background, and wide open spaces for troops to collide in a bloody mess is enough to light up anybody's imagination. So what could turn a staunch pacifist into an over-excited World War II strategist, sending thousands of conscripts to a 'death by tank' and re-writing one of the bloodiest chapters in recent history for the hell of it? Part of it, of course, is the setting. One of them is Shogun: Total War, the other is Sudden Strike.
But none of that matters, because there are two games regrouping over the horizon, ready to charge, that have restored my faith in the genre.
I might even have badly bruised my forehead after hitting the keyboard as I was bored unconscious by legion upon legion of'build a base, mine resources, create 6,000 units, rush enemy base' games. I might have cried, "What do you mean you can't play while it's paused?" in abject horror when I first played Command & Conquer and screamed, "But I'd just started building my base!" as I got massacred within seconds playing any of its clones. Having built a strong reputation for abhorring real-time strategy games, it may seem strange to find me writing about one with some enthusiasm, but that is exactly what is about to happen.
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