Moogle Reviews - Wargame : European Escalation

[The_DarthMoogle]

It's all a RUSE. Or so it looks from here.

Remember there was all that hype and permajizzing about that strategy game for the consoles that was meant to be so revolutionary yet was totally mediocre? Yeah, well here it is on the platform it deserved, and it's a tour de force that deserved better marketing. It's fantastic and could be a staple diet for the RTS fan for years yet. Here's why.

RTS games in general have been swaying away from that whole 'base building' nonsense in recent years, in favour of getting players into the heart of the action, making tactical choices. World In Conflict anyone? Now that was groundbreaking, for sure. And it was damn pretty. But things have moved on, and WEE (haha) has taken up the banner for the genre in style.

So first, how it looks. At first I was bombarded and given epilepsy and died due to the game scoping out my system to see the point at which it fails, resulting in the fan going bats and the screen flickering like crazy. And then I was treated to nice pretty real time vistas, so hooray. The menu screwed with my head for a sec. Getting it off of Steam means no manual to browse through while the thing installs (I miss that so much), and finally seeing all of these teeny tiny butans in the corners of the screen á la Wargame (moviefilm) with abbreviated writing kinda bowled me over. I wandered into a screen filled with all this unit data, and my brain asploded. Not nice. Oh, and then I found the 'SOLO' button and found a game to play, which was nice.

Really pretty game. And the detail is harrowing. Set in Cold War Europe, the weapons systems and stats are meticulously researched. Thank fuck we never had a Hot War. So, I blundered into a nice intro movie about defecting Germans, and waltzed into a game playing as Germans. What kinda of twisted universe is this where my Allied tutorial has me playing as a faction every other game vehemently instructs me to kill? Oh well, her we go. Oh wat. I'm killing more Germans. Those nasty East side Germans. But then I ran into some Brits, so that was all cool.

The game controls are fantastically fluid. Everything you need to do the most complex manoeuvres are actually on the screen whenever you select a unit. Special abilities, munitions allocation, fire rates, merging, loading, unloading. Be as brash or calculated as you want, this game will fit you like a glove.

Gameplay itself involves mostly putting your command vehicles into capture zones. These zones are rather vague, so it's nice to see objectives ending up very dynamic as enemy command vehicles could be bloody anywhere in a 10 square mile box. Add player placed, cappable FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) resupplying passing forces into the mix, and you have no two games the same. Entering your own units into the battlefied requires you to have command vehicles in the fringe capture zones, plus reinforcement points gathered from holding your capture zones. Which nicely leads me on to this games biggest strengths.

Multiplayer and the Decks. What's a Deck? It's a set of unit cards, that you spend command points completing multiplayer games or any objective in solo play, which you can take with you into games and bring into the battlefield. It's super handy for new players to learn winning combinations of units and buy them into their deck, ready to just deploy them all. This is why the game remains an RTS, rather than Real Time Tactics. You have to plan way in advance, before even entering the damn lobby.

Oh and lobbies are cool. If you make a game and no one joins, or the players you get are duff (or actual Germans), then you can just bring up the servers list and bitch them out straight away. Host migration is very very very smooth. But don't worry about leaving your beloved team behind, the reinforcement points get scaled accordingly, meaning then game can compensate all the way for a fair 7v1. I've done it already, and it's intense.

So there we go, I'm tired and I want to play more. If anyone feels I'm missed something here, just shout it out so peeps can see!

As of the time of writing, the Focus weekend deal on Steam includes a bunch of other cool games for the same price as WEE (lol) go check it out, and hope to rush you with the SAS sometime.