Advanced Tactics: World War II

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

When I first got Advanced Tactics I felt like I could have written a review already.  There was so much that was similar to the game's freeware predecessor People's Tactics that I thought, "I'm not going to complain about  a free game, but now I've paid for this:  The gloves are off."  But as so often happens, I was wrong.

I was generally underwhelmed by People's Tactics.  It reminded me of Empire and various Empire clones like XConq, with their wargame-lite scenarios.  I enjoyed those games immensely, but PT appeared a decade or so later and there wasn't much to show for all that time except for a clumsier interface.  In PT you needed to capture towns in North Africa to use their vast production capacity to build new units, exactly like didn't happen in WW2.  And you weren't playing the Italians you were the "Trade Federation", fighting the "Island Kingdom" for the famous port of "El Fez" ... and the map itself could be hidden because hey, most of the world was still terra incognita in the 1940s.  Crazy stuff to a wargamer.

That heritage is still there in this new version:  you can still play scenarios with orcs in them and start with most of the map hidden pending exploration, but the historical scenarios are just that little bit more historical now.  Italy, Britain & Tobruk all appear under their real names, though for some reason most SS units have those initials missing. I'm not sure if this represents some kind of political sensitivity as some of the names made it through, and interestingly in this day & age a lone swastika also squeaked in.  I'm not going to tell where as I'm sure that'd lead to its immediate pixellation.

The game's underlying combat engine is interesting.  Units are made up of sub-formations of an unspecified size, eg: an infantry division may be made up of a number of infantry, machine gun and anti-tank gun units, and combined arms tactics seem to be rewarded in combat.  Personally I'd be happier if it was said somewhere that these sub-formations represented companies, or battalions or whatever, but maybe that's just me, and I can see the advantage in keeping the engine as generic as possible.  In fact, a lot of the fun of the game is in tweaking the mix of these sub-formations to try out tank heavy units, motorised infantry vs cavalry units and so on.  It's this aspect of the game that pushes AT above the standard beer & pretzels fare for me, and gets it a second star for game play.

There are other aspects of play that I'm keen to try, random maps, multiplayer scenarios, what looks to be a comprehensive editor and more, but the ability to roll my own panzer division has been a great distracter.  So far the AI's been as competent as can be hoped for, it certainly seems to know the combat rules better than me and delights in trying to encircle my units which is all very promising.

Nuts & Bolts

There are still some unfinished (nay, unpolished) parts of this game, but most of them are minor.  The kind of things that I fully expect could be fixed with a minor patch or two.  Examples from the trivial to the slightly more important include: the game's small icon is missing, so the generic 16x16 Visual Studio icon appears when the game's minimised; there are no NATO icons, just stick men on the counters [1] ; several of the graphics in the editor & in some of the  scenarios on the developer's site don't line up properly, probably indicated these were the least tested or most recent bits of the game; there's no option to turn off the music without turning off the sound; there's no undo button; and compounding the lack of an undo button, it's pretty well impossible to see a unit's movement circle against a snowy background; there's no way to watch the AI's turn as it happens, instead you need to click, click, click through a replay; there are too many mouse clicks involved to do most things in fact, and on it goes.

So far I've encountered no major bugs, and most frequent actions like moving & fighting have keyboard shortcuts that go a long way to fixing that last mouse click problem.  But while most of the issues are minor there are still enough of them to stop this game getting a second star for nuts & bolts.  Another way of saying that though is:  after that minor patch or two this game would be a serious contender to get four stars, which for a beer & pretzels game is amazing.  As it is the game seems a little clunky, but only a little, and is amazingly bug free.

In conclusion ...

This is Victor Reijkersz's first commercial game, and I'm hoping there'll be more, which is a pretty high recommendation in itself.  Don't be fooled by the orcs, there's some serious wargaming fun to be had here.

And ANOTHER THING ...

[1] This game's graphics are eminently mod-able , so I did.  Here are a set of NATO icons along with instructions on how to install them.