My 500th post on the Escapist Forums, what better way to celebrate it than another entry in the series that's the nearest thing I have to a claim to fame?
The late George Carlin once said "I've seen so many World War II documentaries on the History Channel that I must've seen the same people die hundreds of times." One could easily apply Carlin's joke to the world of video games as well. Medal of Honor, SSI's Five-Star Series, arcade classics like 1942...World War II is right up there with medieval Europe as the most-visited period of history by game developers. The wide range of genres it covers boggles the mind, but for strategic wargames on the subject nothing is quite so ambitious as Hearts of Iron II from Paradox Interactive.
Hearts of Iron II puts you in the role of commander-in-chief of the military and economic forces of any nation you choose, from Nazi Germany to Tannu Tuva to Paraguay and all points in between. It is your job to build up a war economy, churn out troops and ships and planes, and impose your will upon the battlefields of the 1940s. You can fight the Great Patriotic War as the Russians, the two-theater war of the United States, or the island-hopping resource grabs of Japan or you can decide to keep your nation on the path of peace and watch the war play out without you, leading to plenty of "what-if" history as a pacifist USA or even as France ditching the UK and joining the Axis under a far right-wing government. If you can imagine it, it's probably possible in this game.
The interface is very elegant considering the amount of information you have to juggle in the course of a game. You've got the main map tab, on which the war is fought and which plays like a board game with a simple click-to-activate and right-click-to-move aesthetic common to RTS games of all stripes. The Technology tab directs your research and allows you to favor the technology paths that will do the most good for the force mix you've got on the ground. The Production tab does exactly what it says on the tin; from here you'll balance the needs of the consumer economy with the needs of the war machine, building supplies and creating reinforcements and upgrades. Diplomacy is straightforward as well; simply click on the target country, sorted conveniently by alliance and geographic location, and initiate any of about a dozen diplomatic interactions. Finally, the Statistics menu brings up Paradox's world-renowned info-out-the-ass spreadsheets that tell you absolutely everything you'd ever care to know about what's going on in the world and who's winning the war. All this information takes a world that could be overwhelming and sorts it into easily digestible chunks, and for longtime Paradox gamers the move toward user-friendliness and away from the abject helplessness that often accompanied games like Europa Universalis 2 and Victoria is a breath of fresh air.
The game keeps you apprised of what's going on through other means as well. Every message in the game, from critical "Germany just declared war on us" alerts to "Mexico went with Elect Left in Election Times" window spam can be toggled to various degrees of intrusiveness. If you just want the minor messages to scroll through the news log, you can. If you want a game-stopping popup every time some podunk country holds a plebiscite, that's an option as well. Most players will spend the first couple of months of game time fine-tuning the announcements so that only the relevant stuff catches the player's attention. It's a very nice improvement on the Paradox interface and again provides a big move toward game balance and away from information overload.
The nuts and bolts gameplay itself, where the bullet meets the bone, is a delight. "Movement is attack" as it says in the manual, and indeed, you don't have to worry about waiting for your forces to arrive in a territory to initiate combat. Once you click to attack, the battle is resolved and either the attacker stays put right where he is or the enemy is sent running for the hills or surrenders if there's no place to run. There's no ping-ponging of troops here; anyone who's moving is doing so for a legitimate reason and this really helps to cut the micromanagement to a minimum when the bullets start flying. My one squawk is that air combat is very squirrelly and the region patrolling planes don't go where they're put, getting cut apart by antiaircraft fire in a far-off province rather than lending close air support on the battlefield. It's not useless, but it's close enough to it that many players will favor the use of heavy artillery over tactical bombing, bringing the tactics closer in line with the First World War than the Second. This is not necessarily a bad thing; a wargame's a wargame and territory control is governed by numbers rather than men, but it takes a real patient air marshal to get the planes to behave themselves.
Graphically this game is an unashamed 2D board-style wargame. Whether you're using sprites or NATO counters (the latter of which really cranks up the old-school wargamer style), this is not the sort of game you use to show off your video card's capabilities to your friends and looks more like a game from 2001 than from 2005. There's no widescreen support here and the game runs at a resolution of 1024x768, so those with large displays will notice a fair amount of image stretch and distortion especially on widescreen monitors. It doesn't make anything unreadable, but it does underscore that on the gameplay vs. graphics continuum Paradox chose to set the slider so far to the gameplay side of the equation that about the only thing further to the gameplay end is Zork.
The sound is decent but quite unspectacular. There's a severe lack of sound effects as a general matter and the music is quite good but lacking in variety. This is the sort of game where you lose nothing from turning the sound off and running an MP3 player or some other sort of media in the background. Further cementing the "all to AI and looks be damned" attitude, the sound shows how little of the development resources were put to it.
Where the game truly shines, especially with the patches that have been applied since its initial release, is in its AI. Experienced wargamers will be able to mop the floor with it, but that says more about the gamer than about his automated opponent. Novice players will find that the AI knows how to marshal its forces, can spot a weakness and exploit it, and even on Normal difficulty where no boosts are applied can more than keep up with production against an inexperienced human. This is a game where the first time you win the war as the Soviets you'll feel like a god among men kicking Nazi butt. Eventually the appeal of playing as "mid-major" nations like Spain and Romania will dawn on the player as all new challenges open up and goals other than conquering the world become a big part of things. Trying to stay alive as Czechoslovakia or Poland, which seems an impossible task, will become the hardcore accomplishments which are the medals pinned to the uniform of any true grognard. Completely secondary objectives like conquering all of South America as Argentina also present themselves as perfectly valid goals as well. The only limiting factor is the game's coming to a dead stop in 1947 whether the player's ready to give up the reins or not. It can be quite irritating, and for those players there's always the game's two expansion packs, Doomsday and Armageddon, which stretch the closing date to 1953 and 1964 respectively.
BOTTOM LINE: Hearts of Iron II is the best grand strategic simulation out there covering the time period. Available either as the initial game (on which I focused this review) or as the Doomsday standalone expansion and its Armageddon enhancement, there's no excuse not to own this one if you like Paradox games, wargames, World War II, or all three.
VERDICT: Buy it. Hit up GamersGate.com and download this one direct to your PC. The Doomsday/Armageddon double-dip runs $19.98, the vanilla game's under ten bucks. No matter which you buy, you're going to love it.
The late George Carlin once said "I've seen so many World War II documentaries on the History Channel that I must've seen the same people die hundreds of times." One could easily apply Carlin's joke to the world of video games as well. Medal of Honor, SSI's Five-Star Series, arcade classics like 1942...World War II is right up there with medieval Europe as the most-visited period of history by game developers. The wide range of genres it covers boggles the mind, but for strategic wargames on the subject nothing is quite so ambitious as Hearts of Iron II from Paradox Interactive.
Hearts of Iron II puts you in the role of commander-in-chief of the military and economic forces of any nation you choose, from Nazi Germany to Tannu Tuva to Paraguay and all points in between. It is your job to build up a war economy, churn out troops and ships and planes, and impose your will upon the battlefields of the 1940s. You can fight the Great Patriotic War as the Russians, the two-theater war of the United States, or the island-hopping resource grabs of Japan or you can decide to keep your nation on the path of peace and watch the war play out without you, leading to plenty of "what-if" history as a pacifist USA or even as France ditching the UK and joining the Axis under a far right-wing government. If you can imagine it, it's probably possible in this game.
The interface is very elegant considering the amount of information you have to juggle in the course of a game. You've got the main map tab, on which the war is fought and which plays like a board game with a simple click-to-activate and right-click-to-move aesthetic common to RTS games of all stripes. The Technology tab directs your research and allows you to favor the technology paths that will do the most good for the force mix you've got on the ground. The Production tab does exactly what it says on the tin; from here you'll balance the needs of the consumer economy with the needs of the war machine, building supplies and creating reinforcements and upgrades. Diplomacy is straightforward as well; simply click on the target country, sorted conveniently by alliance and geographic location, and initiate any of about a dozen diplomatic interactions. Finally, the Statistics menu brings up Paradox's world-renowned info-out-the-ass spreadsheets that tell you absolutely everything you'd ever care to know about what's going on in the world and who's winning the war. All this information takes a world that could be overwhelming and sorts it into easily digestible chunks, and for longtime Paradox gamers the move toward user-friendliness and away from the abject helplessness that often accompanied games like Europa Universalis 2 and Victoria is a breath of fresh air.
The game keeps you apprised of what's going on through other means as well. Every message in the game, from critical "Germany just declared war on us" alerts to "Mexico went with Elect Left in Election Times" window spam can be toggled to various degrees of intrusiveness. If you just want the minor messages to scroll through the news log, you can. If you want a game-stopping popup every time some podunk country holds a plebiscite, that's an option as well. Most players will spend the first couple of months of game time fine-tuning the announcements so that only the relevant stuff catches the player's attention. It's a very nice improvement on the Paradox interface and again provides a big move toward game balance and away from information overload.
The nuts and bolts gameplay itself, where the bullet meets the bone, is a delight. "Movement is attack" as it says in the manual, and indeed, you don't have to worry about waiting for your forces to arrive in a territory to initiate combat. Once you click to attack, the battle is resolved and either the attacker stays put right where he is or the enemy is sent running for the hills or surrenders if there's no place to run. There's no ping-ponging of troops here; anyone who's moving is doing so for a legitimate reason and this really helps to cut the micromanagement to a minimum when the bullets start flying. My one squawk is that air combat is very squirrelly and the region patrolling planes don't go where they're put, getting cut apart by antiaircraft fire in a far-off province rather than lending close air support on the battlefield. It's not useless, but it's close enough to it that many players will favor the use of heavy artillery over tactical bombing, bringing the tactics closer in line with the First World War than the Second. This is not necessarily a bad thing; a wargame's a wargame and territory control is governed by numbers rather than men, but it takes a real patient air marshal to get the planes to behave themselves.
Graphically this game is an unashamed 2D board-style wargame. Whether you're using sprites or NATO counters (the latter of which really cranks up the old-school wargamer style), this is not the sort of game you use to show off your video card's capabilities to your friends and looks more like a game from 2001 than from 2005. There's no widescreen support here and the game runs at a resolution of 1024x768, so those with large displays will notice a fair amount of image stretch and distortion especially on widescreen monitors. It doesn't make anything unreadable, but it does underscore that on the gameplay vs. graphics continuum Paradox chose to set the slider so far to the gameplay side of the equation that about the only thing further to the gameplay end is Zork.
The sound is decent but quite unspectacular. There's a severe lack of sound effects as a general matter and the music is quite good but lacking in variety. This is the sort of game where you lose nothing from turning the sound off and running an MP3 player or some other sort of media in the background. Further cementing the "all to AI and looks be damned" attitude, the sound shows how little of the development resources were put to it.
Where the game truly shines, especially with the patches that have been applied since its initial release, is in its AI. Experienced wargamers will be able to mop the floor with it, but that says more about the gamer than about his automated opponent. Novice players will find that the AI knows how to marshal its forces, can spot a weakness and exploit it, and even on Normal difficulty where no boosts are applied can more than keep up with production against an inexperienced human. This is a game where the first time you win the war as the Soviets you'll feel like a god among men kicking Nazi butt. Eventually the appeal of playing as "mid-major" nations like Spain and Romania will dawn on the player as all new challenges open up and goals other than conquering the world become a big part of things. Trying to stay alive as Czechoslovakia or Poland, which seems an impossible task, will become the hardcore accomplishments which are the medals pinned to the uniform of any true grognard. Completely secondary objectives like conquering all of South America as Argentina also present themselves as perfectly valid goals as well. The only limiting factor is the game's coming to a dead stop in 1947 whether the player's ready to give up the reins or not. It can be quite irritating, and for those players there's always the game's two expansion packs, Doomsday and Armageddon, which stretch the closing date to 1953 and 1964 respectively.
BOTTOM LINE: Hearts of Iron II is the best grand strategic simulation out there covering the time period. Available either as the initial game (on which I focused this review) or as the Doomsday standalone expansion and its Armageddon enhancement, there's no excuse not to own this one if you like Paradox games, wargames, World War II, or all three.
VERDICT: Buy it. Hit up GamersGate.com and download this one direct to your PC. The Doomsday/Armageddon double-dip runs $19.98, the vanilla game's under ten bucks. No matter which you buy, you're going to love it.
