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Blitzkrieg II Fall of the Reach |
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Sunday, 01 July 2007 |
Holy cow, is this game hard. Hard like getting ants to fight beetles or cats to march in columns, or playing rock-paper-scissors with an octopus. From the manual: "Fall of the Reich... is primarily aimed toward the players who have played the original game (Blitzkrieg II) and...finished at least one campaign: Yeah, no kidding.
This $30 stand-alone expansion to 2005's semirealistic World War ll RTS Blitzkrieg II pits demoralized Germans against Pyrrhic Soviets in two campaigns that loosely engage the 1944 Eastern Front. Whichever side you play, though, the enemy's better entrenched with tougher, more abundant units, and must get a kick out of watching you clumsily wrangle infantry, armor, and air units into some caricature of an attack formation. Counter air with AA, or armor with tank destroyers. Flank, camouflage, snipe, mine, and sweat every inch of your firing arcs..parry all you like, you'll still get caught pants-down by an A.I. that can work Fall of the Reich's clumsy interface better and quicker than you. A better subtitle for this game? Retries "R" Us.
The game's biggest hang-up is that it's simply too hard to tell what the hell's going on half the time. lnfantry dissolve into bombed-out backgrounds and balk at inexact selection, and enemy AT and artillery always crouch just out of sight and in perfectly staggered waves, reliably razing your shrewdest scouts.
With Company af Heraes playing loose with reality, a market certainly exists for more realistic WWII RTS games. But unless you're a Blitzkrieg II apologist. Fall of the Reich won't be tapping it. |
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