Home Page / PC / B / Blitzkrieg 2: Fall of the Reich / News Listing / News

Too often I've seen a new World War II strategy game come out and completely flop. Blitzkrieg II is definitely not one of those flops. Blitzkrieg II brings innovation to Real Time Strategy by removing the necessity of resource gathering and instead allowing the calling of reinforcing units to augment your beginning force of troops. This allows for battles which can begin immediately and won't take hours of preparation.

Blitzkrieg II allows the player to choose one of three Campaigns; United States, Germany, or Russia. Each campaign has four scenarios which play out from 1941 to 1945 in which the player has to accomplish goals, both defensive and offensive, without having his forces destroyed. To assist you to this end you are given reinforcements regularly throughout the scenario. The player chooses what units to receive for reinforcements. The wrong choice could mean the difference between glorious victory and swift defeat. Completing a mission gives the player promotion points which can be used to commission officers which improve your options for reinforcements and their abilities.

Control is fairly simple with the basic select and grouping options. Unfortunately the AI leaves a little to be desired as the least intelligent formations are automatically chosen for each unit group and your tanks have a tendency to run your own troops over doing serious damage to your forces. Even in open fields tanks will travel in a single column making it quite easy for enemy anti-tank weapons to pick them off one at a time. Your troops also will not react to the enemy without being directly ordered to. This leads to furious pointing and clicking when your troops encounter an enemy force of any size. Keeping your infantry from getting run over, making sure your tanks spread out to avoid bottlenecks, calling in bomb strikes on fortified positions, and trying to flank your opponent to reduce casualties had my mouse hand aching after the first few hours of play.

The Graphics in Blitzkrieg II are absolutely wonderful. Each of the 250 different units are beautifully rendered in such a way as to make each distinctive despite the lack of zoom available. The environment does allow for a certain amount of interactivity including the toppling of trees by tanks, digging of trenches by infantry and the placement of burned out hulks of wrecked vehicles hindering the advancement of invaders. Explosions of vehicles and bombs were stunning in their rendering. Unfortunately the detail of the models and the effects cause the game to cause serious performance issues even in a newer gaming machine. Each unit speaks it's native language and while the American hillbilly accent does lend a nice touch the voice acting leaves much to be desired. The sound effects are accurate and essential to the feel and pace of the game.

Overall I feel Blitzkrieg II to be a definite step forward in the WWII RTS subgenre. With over 60 different types of infantry out of a total of 250 different historically accurate units Blitzkrieg II shows an attention to detail that surpasses any historical RTS I have yet to play. Each unit behaves in combat as historically accurately as I could imagine with only the formation AI being somewhat faulty. It may take some time for players to learn the ins and outs of the individual units (I had made a serious mistake in an early game and ended up losing nearly half my force within one minute), but once the specifics are known, any situation can be overcome with the proper use of the units provided.

As a side note I would like to warn that the game automatically loads a program called “Starforce” which serves as a copy protector for the game. This program runs in the background of your system even when not accessing the game and does not allow the access of even legal disk copying utilities. It does not request permission to load and is difficult to remove fully. From the research I've done into the matter the company seems to think that anyone who would complain about the program is someone who would copy the game. I, personally, do not make copies of games for any purpose. What I do not like is the idea of a program which is difficult to remove loading itself onto my computer without my permission much less one which runs in the background eating up memory. For this reason I removed Starforce and, unfortunately, Blitzkrieg II from my computer as soon as this review was nearly complete.