{"id":678,"date":"2007-06-13T10:47:24","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T14:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/06\/13\/theatre-of-war\/"},"modified":"2008-01-02T11:17:52","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T15:17:52","slug":"theatre-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/06\/13\/theatre-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Theatre of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can read my review of Theatre of War<\/a>\"\"<\/em> over at Gameshark. This is my first review for the site<\/a> and hopefully not my last. Gamerankings converts the B- to a 75 which sounds a little high. The sense I’m trying to get here is “problematic, but worth a look.” I’m shooting for a low B-. Maybe I’m just an easy grader.<\/p>\n

The range of reviews is pretty typical for a game like this. Over at 1UP\/GFW, Matt Peckham dings the game hard<\/a> for things that I found frustrating, but not game breaking. At Gamespot, Brett Todd liked the “incredibly tense” pace<\/a> and “rigorous accuracy”. (He also found the AI “outstanding”, which is pretty far off the mark, in my opinion.) And at Wargamer, Jim Cobb makes very useful comments in a review<\/a> that opens with a discussion about the eLicense system. His review is closest in tone to mine, I think, though again I think I am more forgiving.<\/p>\n

In any case, this was a low B- for me because of the suicidal infantry and line of sight problems. Peckham is right to spend most of his brief review talking about them especially since they will cause some players a lot of problems. But Todd is also right that a lot of the tension is genuine and rooted in how you need to have a plan and make the plan work. This isn’t Company of Heroes<\/em> – you need to scout and react to what you find. The limited availability of air power and artillery can let you punch a hole in the enemy’s line, but there’s always a temptation to burn that stuff off for easy beginnings, only to find a strong point waiting for you on the other side.<\/p>\n

There’s probably too much micromanagement for newcomers, and the most serious wargamers will get the most pissed that the default setting for infantry squads is Pickett’s Charge. But there is probably a middle group that likes the detailed execution of a battle plan and doesn’t get too hung up on losing a few guys from time to time. For them I’d recommend Theatre of War<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Oh, and guys? It’s not an RTS<\/a>. It’s a wargame. Don’t make me show you Harpoon<\/em> again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can read my review of Theatre of War over at Gameshark. This is my first review for the site and hopefully not my last. Gamerankings converts the B- to a 75 which sounds a little high. The sense I’m trying to get here is “problematic, but worth a look.” I’m shooting for a low […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[64,6,19],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-aW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}