Blitzkrieg 2: Liberation
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Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Ascaron Genre(s): Strategy Home Page:
More Than Meets The Eye This is the first level in the German campaign; prepare for a difficult experience Gameplay is deceivingly simple – a throwback to one of the grandfathers of the WWII strategy genre, Sudden Strike. There's no resource gathering, no building and certainly no unrealistic unit upgrading. Instead, each battle begins with a finite number of units, and resource preservation is crucial to a successful outcome. Occasionally, it is possible to call in reinforcements, though the mix and number of reinforcements varies depending on the battle (though on a broader scale, more resources are available as the campaign progresses - taking historical accuracy into consideration, of course). Of course, each battle has a number of objectives, and completing all of them is the route to victory. Some RTS standards do find their way into the game, though in a pared-down format. For instance, some objectives require that a point be captured (by spending a certain amount of time at an artillery unit, for instance). At least one supply depot must be under your control to maintain a flow of supplies, though capturing more than one is beneficial only because it keeps the depot out of enemy hands. Engineers are particularly helpful; by repairing units, laying (or disarming) mines and building structures, these jacks-of-all-trades can turn the tide of a battle.
Since military history (or any form of history, actually) has never been a hobby of mine, I'm more inclined to seek out gameplay touchstones than to be wowed by a game's unrelenting adherence to historical accuracy. As such, I may not be in the target audience for Liberation, but there were elements of the game that I enjoyed. At first, the vast number of potential units was overwhelming, but as I played on I realized that each unit has a very precise role in a battle. This makes unit selection (and inter-unit grouping) paramount, and though it takes time to learn, each battle has a fairly effective complement of offensive and defensive units.
For someone like myself, who's not in tune to the nuances of commandeering troops on a hyper-realistic virtual battlefield, the difficulty level is skewed toward "impossible". Rarely did my choice of tactics end positively for my side. Both campaigns share the same insane difficulty level, and this is one of the very few games that I was unable to complete in its entirety for that very reason. The devil is in the details, and neglecting to put units in the correct stance or missing the timing of simultaneous advances are only two of the dozens of ways to screw up an assault. And since line-of-sight is a fleeting entity on the battlefield, I often found myself within attack range but without the ability to target the enemy. Certainly, a better working knowledge of the dozens of units would have made me a more effective player, but I'd pay to see the gamer capable of handling the enemy on the highest difficulty setting.
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