Tag Archives: european escalation

Thoughts: AirLand Battle.

stunned

First, there was Wargame: European Escalation. Now, almost exactly a year later, there is another one of it. Since I loved the first Wargame I’m more receptive than I might otherwise be to a sequel that’s been turned out in such a short period of time, but if it were another developer and another series I’d probably be inclined to assume that AirLand Battle was a low-effort attempt to cash in on the original game with another made using the same assets. AirLand Battle asks for the full £30 on Steam (although it was 25% off if you already owned the first Wargame and you can pick up a disk copy on Amazon for just £20) and so it was going to have to do more than be a slightly shinier iteration on the Wargame concept in order to justify its asking price. Fortunately – and actually somewhat surprisingly – it delivers in spades.

Continue reading

Tagged , , , ,

Thoughts: Wargame.

Wargame: European Escalation (henceforth referred to as Wargame because honestly) suffers from an affliction similar to many of its peers; a horrible disease I have dubbed Total War Syndrome. The most telling symptom of TWS is that all the publicity screenshots for the game tend to be close-ups of the action like the one headlining this review. The military hardware and the explosions are all very photogenic if you’re into that sort of thing, but that kind of picture is actually a little bit useless from a marketing point of view because all it tells the person looking at it is that Wargame is a game with nice graphics. Lots of games these days have nice graphics. Nice graphics do not make Wargame stand out from the crowd in any way, and this was particularly telling when somebody asked me the following question as I was talking about the game:

“What is it actually about?”

Continue reading

Tagged , , , ,