![]() ![]() They physically can’t, because unless you’re playing a naval battle (an absurd scenario that fits Wargame about as well as the naval battles fit vanilla Shogun 2) they’re restricted to no more than a third of the map at any one time.Īs a result Red Dragon battles play out much the same as the ones in Airland Battle did, and therein lies the rub: while it certainly makes more of an attempt to change things up from the previous incarnation than your average edition of Football Manager, there’s no getting around the fact that if you already own Airland Battle Red Dragon can’t show you much that is genuinely new. They don’t have anywhere near the impact that planes did. Which are by their nature restricted to water, an element which has hitherto not featured on Wargame battlefields beyond the odd river or lake. Boats which have been just as lovingly modelled as the rest of the units in the game, and which are preposterously powerful when they actually get to shoot at things, but which are, at the end of the day, boats. Red Dragon’s headline addition to the gameplay of Airland Battle, on the other hand, is boats. ![]() Airland Battle and European Escalation are consequently very different games. Where are you going to apply pressure next? Can those infantry squads holed up in the town hold out against a potential attack, or will it be a good idea to station some reserves nearby to minimise your reaction time? What’s the best place to put your recon units so that you can see the enemy coming ahead of time? These are the questions that occupy your attention in Wargame, and there’s nothing else quite like it on the market.Īirland Battle’s headline addition to the gameplay first demoed in European Escalation (aside from a drastic overhaul of unit counters that made them far easier to decipher) were a hundred-odd variants of jet aircraft, and their ability to arrive at any location in seconds on a battlefield where everything normally moves so slowly completely changed the flow of a battle. Because the battlefields are so large it can take several minutes to redeploy forces to face a new threat, and since it’s so hard to react quickly (save with aircraft) you spend nearly all of your time in Wargame zoomed out and considering the big picture. Units are modelled on the scale of individual tanks and squads of infantry, and the whole thing is very slow and very micro-light the outcome of a firefight will rely far more on your units’ positioning and line of sight when you started it than it will your ability to issue orders to those units in the heat of the moment. The conceit of the series is that various Cold War militaries are fighting it out over battlefields measuring several dozen square kilometres, and that the way the game represents this combat strikes a good compromise between grognardy realism and actually being able to finish a game inside of half an hour without your squishy human brain imploding under the sheer weight of all the numbers. I won’t bore you too much with the nitty-gritty of how Wargame works, since I already went into it in excruciating detail in my reviews of European Escalation and Airland Battle. It’s already as good as it can be, and so Red Dragon instead needs to concentrate on framing those core mechanics in new and interesting ways. After Airland Battle already raised the bar to a point pretty close to where I suspect the ceiling is for the Wargame franchise, Red Dragon was going to have to do something pretty damn special in order to warrant filching yet another £23 from my pocket – and unfortunately for Red Dragon, thanks to that ceiling there doesn’t seem to be any more latitude to refine the series any further in terms of the core mechanics. ![]() Eugen are releasing these things like clockwork, but while last year’s Airland Battle was a massively polished and improved version of European Escalation that more than justified a cheeky release of something that looked like practically the same game just one year later, the simple fact that it was so good has created some problems for Red Dragon. ![]()
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