Gary Grigsby’s Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich

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

What you probably already know is that Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich is an update of two old Talonsoft games: Battle of Britain, and 12 O’Clock High: Bombing the Reich.

What you might expect would be that the crabby old interface of the old games had been improved, and that for good measure the excessively bloody combat of the original games might have been fixed too. But if you expected either, well, like me you’re going to be disappointed.

The new games are practically unchanged. The Battle of Britain now uses the slightly improved 1999 engine of its sequel. One or two minor bugs were supposedly fixed since then too … there are some new graphics that to my eye look as bad or worse than the old ones … and maybe some other minor things; but I’m really fishing to think of anything that’s noticeably different, much less better, much less worth the asking price.

Nuts & bolts

The new game isn’t so much unstable as really, really fragile. Alt-tab … & it blows up. Start a game, close it, & start another without rebooting … and you get a mish-mash of the unit graphics of both games. Generally if you tread very carefully you can keep the game chugging along just fine, but this lack of any kind of programming robustness is something I haven’t had to deal with in a very long long time. It just doesn’t bode well for what’s happening in the game’s ancient, DOS infected heart. And you don’t have to look far to see DOS right up on the surface.

The interfaces of the original Grigsby/Talonsoft games were annoying ten years ago, and they are absolutely unforgivable now. Just one example should suffice.

I started one game as Germany to see what would happen if I dropped the production of the venerable Me109 & some other older models, & replaced them with something a bit more Fw190-ish, but I ended up giving up. To open production you have to look under targets – who knows why, aircraft production isn’t mentioned at all in the game’s skimpy manual, the worst I’ve seen in a long time – then to change each factory’s production is a truly carpal tunnel syndrome inducing experience. Select multiple items on this or any other list? Forgeddaboutit. There are no standard interface items, lists or anything else that you might be used to seeing in any OS since Windows 95. Nuthin’.

Once you’ve done click, click, clicking for over an hour to issue the one line order ‘change all the fighter factories over to making the Fw190A6’ – what would be a five second job in any more modern game – only then do you get to discover that even though you can change D.520 factories to make Focke Wulf 190s – hey, you the Reichsmarschall baby – but you can’t ever change a D.520 unit to use the new damn planes. Nope, sorry sir, that's not on. And don’t even ask why Vichy air units are so active in defending the Reich, they pop up everywhere which is just strange. My wrist still hurts the next day.

Everything takes many, many more mouse clicks than it should. Information is in weird places, or jumbled together on lists of current & future things for example, like somehow adding a new list would have been just too much effort. Or else useful information’s not presented at all. This is a Grigsby interface from the nineties with all that implies, and it’s in the raw, without anything like the helper programs good folks subsequently wrote for games like WITP, and it’s without any meaningful Admiral’s Edition-like update. If you hated it then, you’ll hate it now. If like me you put up with it then, well, your call. But boy oh boy do I hate it now.

Zero stars for the nuts & bolts part of the score.

Game play

The asymmetric turn sequence of the attacking player planning & executing their raids, and of the defending player reacting to those raids is the same as in the original games. As the attacker you have no control once you press play, you can’t react at all. Nor for some reason have either side yet invented the weather forecast … Though it feels quite old fashioned it’s still workable enough.

I think the game has the same scenarios included with the original games, as far as I can tell there’s nothing new here at all scenario-wise. So far, so much the same. Depressingly so. And there’s more of the same.

Where the old games really fell over for me wasn’t over their awful interfaces, but rather they fell down because after all the effort, all the careful calculation, all the sheer tediousness of interacting with the clumsy controls, to add insult to wrist-injury the results that came back were hopelessly unrealistic. Not a good look in a supposedly super realistic game.

Just like in other Grigsby games that use the same calculate-every-little-thing approach to combat, like War in the Pacific for example, air combat was (and remains) way too bloody. Way, way too bloody. I’ll get to writing about the War in the Pacific:Admiral’s Edition approach to fixing this problem in another review – hint, it works much better than this does – but I don’t even see that the problem’s acknowledged in this game at all. Raise this or any objection in the forum or on UseNet (to quote my own efforts, but there are others) & you get a swift and sometimes nonsensical rejoinder. <shrug> OK, whatever.

Bombing the Reich starts with the Schweinfurt raid, where historically losing 60 bombers lead to much hand wringing, licking of wounds and even the consideration of switching the Mighty Eighth to night bombing – not that you can do that in the game even if you wanted to, it’s hardwired in the scenario & there’s no editor – but that's ok, cause in the game there’s no need. You can take double or even triple the Schweinfurt losses regularly, without ever batting an eyelid. Planes fall out of the sky by the group & Geschwader-load and nothing untoward happens, you just get more.

Damaged planes exploding on landing may be the culprit here, I gave up trying to marry up the losses I was seeing in the game with anything like Freeman’s brilliant day by day, raid by raid war diaries. In fact in case you can’t tell, after a few weeks of trying quite hard I generally just gave up on this game altogether.

Because without any real risk of defeat (unless you’re doing something really strange) there’s no tension, just repetition. Destroy one target, destroy the next, on and on with each mission much the same as the last one. Unlike in real life where each mission was a gamble and should have been interesting to play out.

Within this framework the AI does pretty well. It’s better in defence than attack, but it’s too aggressive both ways, attacking your raids with everything from the moment they cross the channel (either way) till the moment they get back; attacking and attacking till it runs out of planes. And when bombing it does the same hairy cheasted things, it goes for repeated deep raids from day one and just doesn’t stop. But that’s ok I suppose, I lost interest before it did, and at least it doesn’t just sit there; and it does some things just right, like attacking stragglers for example.

An aggressive AI and a game where you can think about the relative merits of machinegun versus cannon armament for fighters (and yes, I think it gets this wrong too), and Oboe and Windows and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the air war gets this game its one star for game play from me. If the combat results hadn’t been quite so Hollyweird then it’d be two stars easily. If you’re more interested in the process than the result – and as a player of Grigsby games you may well be, nothing wrong with that – it may well already be two stars worth of game play for you.

In conclusion …

This remake is obviously a labour of love. But just as obviously, I think the labourer loved the original game just that little bit too much.  Rather more tough love was required here.

Just one star from me. I’d recommend waiting ten years for the next remake. Save your money and get your old copies of the Talonsoft games to run in the meantime, it’s pretty likely you won’t notice the difference.