The General Gaming Thread!

[warty goblin]

That game looks pretty sweet!

Just finished the second campaign mission. This has given me the following information

1) The campaign is fun. I'm a well documented hater of the RTS campaign, so I do not say this lightly, but this is some good stuff. It's straight up strategizing, there's no unendurable story full of saccharine characters having Heroic Wartime Moments, horrid cutscenes of models viewed from much shorter distances than they should be, stupid mission objectives or any of the other crap that usually seems to get in the way of a decent RTS campaign.

Instead you get a very short summary of the current geopolitical situation which segues into a very short briefing on the current battlefield status, after which it's straight into hot tank-on-tank action. Better yet, all the pre-mission stuff is presented like a history lecture, it's even in that weird pseudo-present tense historians use when talking about the past. This makes the whole thing feel sort of like a playable documentary.

And the missions themselves, at least so far, feel very organic and believable. It's very much here's the situation, here's what you need to do. It seems to be doing what a campaign mission should do, setting up an interesting tactical scenario, then turning you and the AI loose to blow stuff up.

2) It doesn't really feel like an RTS. This is a hard thing to define, but it really doesn't. I suspect a lot of it comes down to units coming from a finite, off-map and persistent pool. Since they gain levels in action, you really do not want to lose them, which breeds a constant level of paranoia and encourages fighting like a clever bastard. The large maps and long engagement ranges reinforce this as well. I'm really digging the tactical and strategic maneuver so far.

3) It's hard. I had to restart the second mission three times before I could win. Part of this was unfamiliarity with the mechanics, part of it was simply fighting very badly, and part of it was being set a genuinely interesting and challenging scenario. I needed to seize a crossroads, hold that position, take another position on one flank, and neutralize an enemy FOB on the other flank. At no point did I have enough units to make a head-on assault viable, so I had to bait, flank, ambush and generally fight like a clever bastard.

I did get to command some infantry, but the map was chock full of tanks and wide open field, which meant that actually using foot soldiers for an assault was pretty much suicidal. I did try to use a British recon team to neutralize some jeep mounted AT units, but they got picked off by a Challenger MBT before the ground pounders got into position.

If it keeps up this level of quality, it'll be a real gem of a game.