With a dearth of RTS games on xbox one, I'd of picked up anything in the genre at this point to remind me of my PC gaming days of yore. As it happens, Sudden Strike 4 was the first game (other than Halo Wars) that fit the bill and, boy, does it hit the spot.
It's a game that seems deceptively simple to play, but draws you into deeper layers of strategy with each mission, each objective.With a dearth of RTS games on xbox one, I'd of picked up anything in the genre at this point to remind me of my PC gaming days of yore. As it happens, Sudden Strike 4 was the first game (other than Halo Wars) that fit the bill and, boy, does it hit the spot.
It's a game that seems deceptively simple to play, but draws you into deeper layers of strategy with each mission, each objective. The enemy can be confronted with a variety of tactics - every one of your units, no matter how small, can play a crucial part in achieving victory over the enemy. The units, and there are many, are accurately detailed and lovingly rendered, and they sure blow up nice.
And blow up they will. The gameplay is as solid as any RTS I remember, and this game is certainly the best entry in the Sudden Strike franchise, despite it being developed by a new publisher. The game is sturdily made. The controls are intuitively streamlined and easy to pick up and I have yet to experience any slowdown in frame-rate or crashing even at the height of pitched battles. My one complaint would be a the relatively simple AI. It will crush you if you are careless, but it doesn't have the complexity of human opponent. The enemy can be absolutely exploited if the player is patient and clever enough. Still, trying to outwit the enemy to preserve as many of my men as possible became my overarching goal - think of Captain Miller's existential crisis in Saving Private Ryan. When a lone rifleman of mine, who had crawled for miles spotting the enemy was finally gunned down, I could only watch agonizingly as he bled out slowly, the situation being too dangerous to send a medic in to save him. Now, there is a multiplayer option available that I am sure will provide the couch general with hours of more content and a deeper challenge.
Graphically the game shines. It is optimized for the Xbox X, but I found that the level of detail was astonishing even playing on my first generation Xbox One and displayed on 4 year old 42 inch 1080p television. The top down view is far enough away to provide a good gauge on the action but also provide an intimate view of the action. From this angle you get a birds-eye view of a very real experience of war - tracer rounds zip in the air, blood spurts from arterial wounds, tank shells ricochet or punch through enemy armor with ferocious intensity, and artillery and rocket shells explode leaving a cratered no-man's land strewn with bodies and husks of vehicles. Best of all, the sound editing is fantastic and captures every single effect of the deadly cacophony.
Things can and will get hectic, as they do in war. There will be tanks that don't make the "right" decision when moving through obstacles in the heat of the moment. You do have to micromanage your troops, and sometimes it can be frustrating to get them to move exactly how you want them to. Still, it was easy for me to imagine that troops and tankers would make foolish movements in the heat of battle, and it is one of the enduring challenges (charm?) of the genre that almost every game like this suffers from in some degree. Overall, I think pathfinding issues are certainly not game-breaking and can mostly be forgiven.
Much of these minor foibles can be overlooked since the game is so stuffed with content. You have the base game which follows several campaigns (German, Russian, American/British) spanning across the European theater, all the DLC (2 additional campaigns), a skirmish mode, and multiplayer. 40 bucks, and a remarkably small, quick download on the marketplace, and all of it is yours.
If you are like me and saddled with a console, love history, WWII, or strategy games - do yourself a solid and BUY this game. It really deserves to succeed on the Xbox and it's important to reward risk-taking publishers like Kite Games, who try and bring us these new experiences, with our money. Support these guys, and who knows what other companies might be willing to put in the extra development to get their product on the Xbox console market (looking at you, Total War). Now, if only we could get a really good flight simulator, say in the vein of IL-2 Sturmovik...… Expand
Sudden Strike 4: European Battlefields EditionYour Score0 out of 10User Score
