The Falklands War: 1982

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts

 

The Falklands was my first war. I was alive during Vietnam, but only just, so in one way or another it's being a teenage boy in the days before the Internet & tuning in to shortwave broadcasts to get the latest news that I guess is my personal template for all the wars that have happened or that I've studied ever since.

The whole "I counted them all out, & I counted them all back" stuff was suitably stirring. And when I took the Queen's shilling myself three years later the Falklands was still the most recent war, & the one where our (probably rehashed) soldiers' jokes were set. So as the only computer game I know of about the conflict I'm probably more predisposed to like The Falklands War than not.

Nuts & bolts

And you need to approach this game with a positive outlook, for there are a hundred and one minor annoyances before you play your first game.  But persist, persist!

The first thing I got when I started the game was a warning that only display settings less than 24-bit are supported - and if like me you try &  ignore the warning the game will die in a welter of DirectDraw error messages. I hate stuff like this, much more than I care about support or lack thereof for wide screens.  If I have to change the settings on my machine --  the settings that work with every other program I own -- just to run one lonely program, well it almost guarantees the odd program out won't get a look in.                                                                                                                

When you dial your display down the menus still don't paint properly (they only show up once your mouse has moved over them), and when they do show up they have an annoying unnecessary apostrophe before every S. Historical Scenario's.

Next you select  a scenario & get asked if you want to modify the skill levels for friendly & enemy units, but it's only after you make your blind choice that you get a briefing in your browser telling you which side you'll be playing. All the scenarios are set up to be played from one side only, & you don't get told which one it is beforehand. (Argh!)

This is all a shame, cause the historical flavour the briefings give is great, and the game once you get to it, is ... well, not quite great, but pretty good. I gave the nuts & bolts one star because it just seemed better in practice than it sounds here on virtual paper. The annoyances are real, don't get me wrong, but the game itself is good enough that I think you'll want to try & look past them too.

There are a hundred and one annoyances in the game as well, if you want to find them ... but I tried not to look ...

Game play

There are a few things the ProSimCo games do just right interface-wise that I haven't seen done quite so well anywhere else, and they're worth pointing out. But that said, a lot of things in this game are slightly harder than they should be.  Polished this game isn't.

First the good things.

Electing which size units to display on the map works well. You can show platoons & give orders at that level, or you can show companies (and so on). The other levels of command are still there of course, you just can't click on them by mistake. The unit-type filter on the display in Panther's games doesn't quite work as well as this at getting around the problem of having overlapping piles of unit symbols when everything's displayed. That said, the Panther games are a lot more polished.

Units can be attached to orders, as well as the other way around. By attaching units to orders I mean for example: clicking on the dismount command will put a cross (for some reason it's a cross to indicate the affirmative) through all of the boats you have that have troops to dismount.  Then you can click on all of the boats that you want to put their guys ashore. Clicking on a unit and selecting the dismount command from a popup menu is also possible, but the first method has the advantage of showing you just which units can and which units can't dismount without you having to click through all of them.  Nice. (And a shame it's gone, cause if  you upgrade the game with Air Assault Task Force you lose this feature.)

Fire missions work the same way. Sort of. But it's here the bad stuff starts.

The problem with fire missions is that artillery units will happily accept fire missions long after their ammo's run out, with nary a peep of protest.  There's no message saying the shooting won't happen, it just doesn't.

All up there's a lot of silent failing that goes on - sometimes units won't move.  There's no info why. No indication that they've stopped either, you just have to notice.  Sometimes it'll have to do with their path crossing impassable terrain, even if just by a bit -- there's no Panther-like put down waypoints & I'll work out a route algorithm here, in this game units go in straight lines from waypoint to waypoint -- sometimes it's not that at all.  There are no clues, you just have to work it out.  Or not.

There are plenty of other annoyances.

You can get a list of requested fire missions, but clicking on the list does nothing.  It would be nice if the targets were highlighted on the map, but as it is, it's just a list.

You can see when units are taking fire or firing, but not what's happening at a sub unit level.  Are they all almost all dead?  Barely scratched? You only find out when they're all gone.  Don't our guys have radios?

There's a lot of strange uses of the right mouse click, which would usually get you a context menu.  Sometimes it does that.  Sometimes it's used to delete fire missions or to flip between stop & go on waypoints (just to be different).

I do like the stop/go switch on waypoints even if I don't like how it's implemented here -- Panther should definitely steal that one (!), telling a unit to halt should be quick & command delay light -- and there are plenty of other nice points game-wise, so despite the annoyances the game still warrants two stars for game play.

But only just.  I think infantry's much too visible and therefore vulnerable to vehicles. It's hard to tell for sure because there are so few vehicles around, and the ones there are tend to belong to HM Navy, but it's a little disconcerting to discover that the best way to go hunting for enemy infantry is to sail a frigate close inshore & ice them with its 20mm canons...

But there are no hexes or CRTs, and an approach to building an accurate simulation of a often forgotten conflict that I admire greatly. If it wasn't for Panther having such a similar system that's just that little bit more finished I'd like this game a whole lot more, but it loses in any direct comparison.

Upgrades(Slash Replacements)

The way ProSimCo update their games is to get you to install more recent copies of the game engine over any old copy.  That's fine as far as it goes, but it means you don't get a copy of the patched game unless you pay for a more recent one, and it also means that you lose the special campaign briefings in the old games - only the individual scenarios are left. And as a final twist, if you install a newer game separately, then try & install a copy over an old game, the installer won't let you.  You need to uninstall the newer game completely, then reinstall it over the old game. Only one copy allowed you see. Pft.

Vista issues

Apart from the 24 bit display setting issue and the weird menu bug, the help file for the game is in the old .hlp style, so isn't available in Vista unless you download install a copy of the old help system. Other than that the game runs fine on Vista (or at least as fine).

In conclusion

If you want to try out this style of game Panther's games are probably a better choice. If like me you want to relive the Falklands, or you've already played those games to death, well you don't have a lot of other options do you?