Decisive Campaigns: The Blitzkrieg from Warsaw to Paris

I quite liked Advanced Tactics, Victor Reijkersz’s last game, so I was looking forward to this; but I was disappointed.

So disappointed that I could barely be bothered to play it, much less to write about it. It’s not a terrible game, not at all. It has some quite nice features, but there are just so many better games to play.

First the good things:  What first intrigued me about the game was that it was less abstract – there’d be a scenario set in Poland with a country called called Germany, and there’d be actual named divisions … all of which might sound like small beans in a wargame but “the Island Nation” and “Grossland” grated pretty quickly in Reijkersz’s  first freeware game, and any movement by him away from that’s a Good Thing™. That piqued my interest, what pushed me over the edge into buying the game was the idea of team play – not often seen in computer wargames and by all accounts handled pretty well here, that was enough for me. I bought.

So there’s lots of promise, but the execution is sloppy. Really sloppy. The manual is awful, a few pages ripped out of most any book chosen at random would probably provide more information. It’s obvious ranges of command and of artillery are important in the game, but they’re not shown on the map and they’re not described anywhere I could see. There seem to be command effects, but it’s almost impossible to tell which units belong to the same formation let alone what the effects are … and the map. The map is what killed this game for me.

The map is nice, very pretty. It’s just a shame I could hardly see any of it - the bottom third of the screen in the game’s taken up by a completely pointless information display in what I think has got to be up there in any list of the great failures of design in wargaming. (Which is quite the achievement, it’s a long list.) Über-letterboxed is just not going to catch on as a map format any time soon I feel. Try it - if you want a demo of this game here’s an easy workaround: just fire up any other wargame you have but tape some cardboard over the bottom third of your screen – the game plays exactly like that.

Top that off with numerous OOB errors & no editor to fix them and it’s all a bucket of fail. If I had to rate the game I’d say two stars. It has a lot of potential, and there are a lot of games that are a lot worse, but the time’s gone when I’d pay good money just to struggle to see some potential and to thank my lucky stars there were worse things I could be doing. A step backwards on the previous game despite looking like it might’ve gone the other way.