Artillery buried in a forest can force you to consider an armor attack or one of those precious, limited air strikes (which may not even be a sensible option if the enemy still has AA guns in operation). Enemies can hold the high ground on hills, necessitating a tough decision on whether to head up with a frontal assault or try to go around them.

Maps are gorgeous, with intricately modeled trees, muddy turf, murky swamps, and so forth, but the real impact is on tactical considerations. Instead of blitzing from one end of a map to the other, you now have to take into account geographical complications. Terrain features are also realistically modeled. But each of the campaign missions and the one-off custom scenarios depict hundreds of square miles of terrain occupied by hundreds if not thousands of troops, tanks, trucks, and artillery, making for lengthy, amazingly intense battles that can take full evenings of play to finish.īattles now consist of multiple stages that take you from the initial moments of an assault through numerous objectives, such as taking out German artillery on D-Day, helping the British at Sicily, and helping the Russians steal from German supply depots before demolishing a train yard. You still don't have to worry about any base-building, given that gameplay is a straight-up tactical blitz of ordering around troops and tanks as well as calling in artillery fire and bombing runs. Whereas the WWII battlefields re-created in the earlier games could be conquered in no more than a couple of hours, the scenarios here are absolutely massive. Scale is what really differentiates Arms for Victory from the first two games in the series and their expansion packs. True to life, sure, but more than a bit frustrating. Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory remains a long way from tactically minded World War II real-time strategy perfection, and it needs some serious battlefield refinements before entering the big leagues, but this is still the best game in the history of the series.īeach landings are dramatic, intense, and spectacularly chaotic.

But the latest addition to the family might just turn things around, thanks to new epic-scale battles and an intensity unmatched by its predecessors. For a game franchise nudging the two million mark in total sales, Sudden Strike doesn't get a whole lot of respect.

Sudden strike 3