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Howdy ho, fellow patriots! C-in-C Ronnie here. Now I hate to interrupt your wholesome American rockin' n' rolling and hip-hops, but it seems as if the gosh-darn Evil Empire's gone and invaded Western Europe and Scandinavia! Even now, the mailed fist of the Soviet Army is smashing unstoppably through the Fulda Gap, while crack Soviet marines storm the beaches of Norway and Denmark. Sure, we'll probably nuke 'em, but I'm told full-scale thermonuclear war polls real poor with the electorate, so how's about instead you pick up a copy of
Wargame and have yourself a hard-drivin' American try at containing the Reds with some good old-fashioned conventional warfare?
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Hang on, Dongs! Isn't "Wargames" an entire genre and also a popular movie?
Haha, no. Well, yes, but also a specific game.
Wargame: Airland Battle is the sequel to
Wargame: European Escalation, Eugen Studios' highly-acclaimed 2012 Cold War real-time strategy game. W:EE, widely regarded as the best RTS of 2012, dealt with battalion- and brigade-scale combined arms engagements between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces on the North German Plain between 1979 and 1989. Building off the IRISZOOM engine used in 2010's equally acclaimed
R.U.S.E., W:EE is notable for rendering battlefields up to 16x16 kilometers in size, and, moreover, accurately simulating hundreds of contemporary pieces of military hardware, ranging from T-72s to Mi-24s to Blowpipes to AMX-30s to MILANs and encompassing 8 different nations. These extend to all aspects of modern ground warfare, including Main Battle Tanks, Anti-Tank Guided Missiles, Motorized and Mechanized Infantry, Reconnaissance vehicles, Gunships, SAMs and Anti-Air Artillery, Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems and Artillery. The game revolves around the careful and effective deployment of all of these assets in support of one another.
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Not pictured: T-72s, Mi-24s, Blowpipes, AMX-30s, MILANs)
The singleplayer campaigns were somewhat ill-designed, despite making a laudable attempt to devise plausible NATO-PACT warfare scenarios that didn't have to end in a nuclear holocaust. The game's main attraction was, and remains, the multiplayer, enhanced by consistent patches and four successive installments of free DLC.
TL;DR - Incredibly generic name notwithstanding,
Wargame is a large-scale military grognard's sim dressed up as an AAA RTS title, and it's awesome and anyone who likes strategy games about tanks should play it forever.
But what's Airland Battle do, then?
Airland Battle proposes to improve on literally all of Wargame's shit, adding 3 whole countries and several hundred new units on top of the original roster, expanding maps to 150km and adding
jet fighters including all your favorite ones from when you were a wee nipper gluing 'em together out of model kits, such as A-10 Warthogs and F-117 Stealth Fighters and Harriers and Su-27 Flankers and and and
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and this fucking thing
World In Conflict did this already, Americans versus Russians is boring
Yeah but what about
Czechs
versus
Danes
or
Poland versus
Canada???????
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Cry Havoc
But for real the game actually includes full unit rosters for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Good Germany AND Evil Germany, Britain, France while ALB adds in Canada, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. I will stake my reputation as an internet military analyst that at least two of those have never been in a real AAA game before in any capacity. Also World In Conflict did not accurately model the distinct characteristics of various weapons platforms, nor did it take into account the logistics associated with arming and fueling mechanized forces during an extended engagement and basically if you play that you're a
baby who needs to nut up and play this, the manliest of games for REAL MEN (and that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books)
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What playing Wargame:European Escalation actually feels like
Dongs this OP is getting long why are you posting this at 4 in the morning anyway
Because I have nobody waiting for me to climb into bed, but for my own demons
also, because Pre-Orders for ALB are meant to go up in the next couple days, supposedly with the prospect of Beta access and man you really should buy that if you got the lucre to hand because that would mean you could conceivably play Swedes vs. Canadians with me! And if other people - and you too, dear reader! - were to buy it we could all play Swedes-Danes-Canadians-French vs. Czechs-Poles-Germans-Russians. There's a bunch of ALB beta gameplay videos up on youtube if you would like to peruse them and the
Official Site has a bunch of neat info on it also ask me about this game and I'll tell you about this game because oh boy I'm fond of this game.
Airland Battle is supposedly slated for release in May, although that's probably gonna be pushed back.
European Escalation is on steam for $34.99, a price which it is absolutely worth. If you are one of those red-blooded boys (or the more intelligent sort of girl) who has already had the gumption to assume the burden of direct tactical command of hundreds of American/Russian/British/French/Good German/Evil German/Czechoslovak/Polish sons on the field of honor, post and I shall herein transcribe your name.
