Product Description
Theatre of War offers a fresh take on the WWII Real-Time Strategy genre by combining the look, feel, sounds and historical elements of the era to create the ultimate warfare simulation — delivered by the developers of the award-winning IL-2 Sturmovik and the makers of the best-selling Combat Mission series. Over 40 missions spread across five campaigns (US-British Allies, Soviet, German, French and Polish), along with 13 additional scenarios that collectively offe… More >>
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March 6th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
A ‘new’ game always has compatibility issues, this one is no different. What is different is, support. My emails where answered and the situation resolved within 1 hour! All of my ‘problems’ where driver related, they had all the info I needed to update my system. Would I recommend this game? Absolutely! I have not rated this 5 star, because I’ve just started using it, but I think it will live up to that level, as far as I’m concerned.
Rating: 4 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
From wiki: “Strategy is distinct from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy. Military strategy is the overarching, long-term plan of operations that will achieve the political objectives of the nation. It is part of the four levels of warfare: political goals, strategy, operations, and tactics.”
There are plenty of war strategy/tactics games out there. Let’s not rank which one is better: World in Conflict, Company of Heroes or Men of War. I have played them all and enjoyed some of them more then the others.
Theatre of War is unforgiving RTTS – real time tactical simulator. Here you need to be concerned by caliber of your AT artillery, AP vs HE rounds, angle of attack, slope of the armor. Yes, you will curse this game in frustration when playing first Polish campaign as you find your forces severely outnumbered and outclassed by well oiled Wehrmacht war machine. You will start smoking and biting your nails. You will be reloading your game very frequently… And yet somehow I’ve enjoyed the challenge. If you are seasoned strategy/tactics veteran you will want to give it a shot. Be forewarned, this is not World in Conflict where you’re led by hand and asked “place your tanks here”, “defend this spot here”.
This is one of the few if not the only games out there that actually has realistic scale modeled fire range and line of sight. AT guns are your only chance to knock out those panzers. You will treasure them above all or otherwise you’re doomed from the get go. Pre-battle deployment is equally important as your quick reaction during the battle. Wrong placement of your forces will pose outflanking threat and total annihilation. Your infantry is a serious threat to enemy tanks if they are in trenches and have AT grenades. Your ammunition is severely limited. Make your shots count. Knock out those guns on tanks first. Or if they come into range – you’re toast. Your units can capture and man guns and tanks. Unfortunately equipment is not transferred between missions. Your soldiers gain experience and it is transferable between missions.
I’ve completed only Polish and French campaigns (the toughest) so far. Game is using IL-2 Sturmovik engine, which works well for very long viewing ranges.
The game is not without problems.
1. Battles take place only on flat or hilly terrains. There is no variety.
2. Performance is not optimized. Running on Win 7 64 bit on SSD RAID-0, Core Duo E8400, 4Gb of RAM and HD5850 – frame rate often gets choppy.
3. Textures and models (graphics in general) are outdated.
4. Clouds are strobe flashing time to time. Shadows are messed up sometimes on ATI hardware if you have v-sync or AA enabled. I will report back if it’s still the case with the newer drivers. (EDIT: shadows and AA are fine on the latest Catalyst with HD5850)
5. Under Vista and Win 7 I suggest to Run as Admin, otherwise I can’t save or make config changes.
That’s why I’m giving it 4 for fun and 3 stars overall. Highly suggest to try out Men of War.
Rating: 3 / 5
March 6th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Although it does say in the product description (at the very end buried under all the other system information), Theater of War does NOT support 64bit Windows Vista. I installed the game to find that the Mission and Campaign Editors as well as the Battle Generator will not work. If you try and start them, it tells you that the utilities are incompatible with this version of Theater of War and will not even try to start. The official site tells you that the game is not compatible with Vista and that they do not support Windows Vista when you look up this problem on their tech support page. End of story. Since I have just spent thirty odd dollars on what is essentially cripple-ware, I have no choice but to warn people off this product and rate it poorly.
Rating: 2 / 5