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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Blitzkrieg 2 Anthology Video Game Review

Miniatures Games

Blitzkrieg 2 Anthology Review

Blitzkrieg 2 is a fun, fast-paced historically flavored game that takes you through several theatres of World War II.

Gameplay is what you’d expect of a real-time strategy game. You issue orders to your units, and them watch them peform on the screen. Battles for me often evolved into a furious clickfest, giving orders to one unit, and then sliding the screen across to issue new ones to a unit that had finished its mission.

The campaign game consists of a series of connected scenarios. Each starts you with a set of units—infantry, armor, artillery and what-have-you—and a set of objectives to meet. The objectives consist of either moving to, or defending a certain location.

What’s missing from the usual real-time strategy formula is the resource gathering. Instead, each scenario comes with a set number of reinforcements. When they become available, you can select from a list that varies from scenario to scenario.

While the game is set in World War II, I wouldn’t call it historical. While the units are recognizable, the mix of units available and their performance often defies expectations. Infantry, for example, is useless, getting mowed down in seconds by enemy units. When dug into a building, the enemy just brings it down around them. Infantry in a trench doesn’t fare much better.

Tanks, on the other hand, appear far too frequently, and are way too tough. Japanese armor strength—both in numbers and in individual toughness—seemed to me way too strong. And there were a couple of European scenarios where I can’t recall seeing a single German infantry unit.

The game is so armor heavy, that when you get reinforcements, there’s no reason to settle for anything less than the heaviest tanks available.

Still, the game is a lot of fun. It’s got that addictive quality where you keep saying to yourself: “just five more minutes.” And then before you know it, it’s 3 am and you realize you’ve been playing for eight hours.

As a casual gamer, I appreciated the ease of play—I ran through the tutorial scenarios and then was able to jump right into the game. There are a lot of “hot keys” available, but I didn’t have to remember any of them because there always are icons available.

A final word about the graphics and sound—aspects which concern computer gamers, but to me are secondary to gameplay.

The graphics are just right for the game: not overly intricate, but with a lot of flavor. You clearly identify each of the units, and they look quite a bit like the real-world things they represent. It’s a bit like watching little toy soldiers and tanks on the screen.

It’s also a lot of fun to watch the damage that the weapons wreak on the terrain Trees fall down, buildings degrade and then collapse, artillery turns ground into moonscapes.

The sound also is fine, but I turned the music off after a few minutes and eventually turned off the sound effects so I could watch television while playing.

In all, I thought the Blitzkrieg 2 Anthology was a huge amount of fun. It’s a nice diversion for those weekends where you can’t get together with your buddies to play with lead and dice.

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