Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Ok, I guess I get to be the counter point here. Before I get into how much I love this game, let me adress the other reviews.
One reviewer said he had problems running the game on a Vista equiped comp. Well surprise surprise! IMO, Vista isn't, never has been, and never will be a gamer friendly OS (not to mention it's so buggy, it was probably designed by an entomologist). The other reviewer stated that the game was to hard. "Unbeatable" was the term he used. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be fair, I never played the first Blitzkrieg so I can't adress the complaint he had with the control scheme changes.
I've been playing this game for about 3 months now and I love it. I have the XP (SP3) OS on my system and the game runs flawlessly. I have so far beaten the Russian campaign and am about half way through the American campaign. I'll tell you straight up; this game is TOUGH, but hardly unbeatable. Like many RTSs, most scenarios have a trick to them that, once you figure it out, victory is assured.
The level of detail here is awesome. Just about every AFV that fought in the great conflict is here and modeled beautifuly (there are a few notable omissions such as the French Char B and the Soviet KV1, but this is just niggling). Each vehicle is rated for armor on each of it's four sides as well as for gun caliber, velocity and amount of ammo caried (for both main gun and machine guns). Put a Sherman up against a Panther head to head, Sherman dies. Sherman catches the Panther from behind however, dead kitty.
As in many games of this type, infantry is pretty much useless in the open. Get them into buildings however and they become absolutely deadly to tanks. They're also handy for capturing enemy AT and AA guns. Nothing I love more than grabbing a couple of 88s and sending a bunch of Krupp shells right back where they came from.
Aircraft are handled kind of abstractly. You don't have any real control over them beyond telling them where on the map you want them to go. They then fly there, do what ever they do on their own, then leave. Bombers are great. Simply click on a given area of the map then sit back and watch them devastate everything in the area. Fighters are pretty much fire and forget weapons. Once called, they'll automaticaly fly around the map engaging any enemy planes they find. I was a bit disapointed with fighter duels however. Although many different fighter types are modeled, air battles almost always end up draws no matter what kind of planes each side is using. Either both sides annihilate each other or there will one aircraft left on each side which then fly away. Unrealistic to be sure. Ground attack aircraft are blast to use. These things just vaporize enemy tank columns and fortifications. In fact, in one Russian scenario, I used nothing but the ledgendary IL2 Sturmovik (finest GA aircraft of the war) to wipe out just about every German unit on the map! I then rolled my tanks into the objective village unopposed. Scenario over. Sweet.
Another cool feature of this game (which I understand wasn't in the first game), is the ability to assign individual officers to you're units (light tanks, line infantry, etc.). The more action the units commanded a given officer see, the more experience he gets. When he gets enough points, he gets promoted. This opens up special abilities for his units such as the ability to entrench quicker, more accurate firing, moving fire etc. This adds a cool RPG element to the game.
Each campaign in Blitzkrieg 2 is made up of a number of smaller scenarios and one "penultimate" scenario which must be beaten in order to advance the game. The smaller battles can be played in any order although the game will recomend the order in which they should be played. This is important as each battle opens up new reinforcement types that will probably be needed in the next battle, and will DEFINATELY be needed in the big one at the end. The key word here is reinforcements. These are basicaly like the "resources" you would gather in other RTS games. Each battle gives you a set number of reinforcements to win the fight with and they should be hoarded like gold. However many reinforcements you have left at the end of a scenario carry over to next. The idea here is to go into the final battle with as many reinforcements as possible. The more you have, the easier it will be to win.
Overall, this is one of the best games I've played in recent years. The only real complaint I have is that there's no playable campaigns for either the British or the Japanese.
If you like RTS games in general, like WW2 games in particular, and are not running Vista :p, I would whole heartedly recomend picking this up.
Blitzkrieg 2 will give you many hours of exciting and challenging gameplay for months to come!
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