Blitzkrieg: Rolling Thunder

The Good
A lot has changed since the battles in Blitzkrieg. The first thing (and for me most important) is the smarter AI. Guess you have an artillery outpost and one after one of your gunners die. What do you do? Wait until you have no more men or send out some tanks? Right, send you the tanks, find and kill the enemy sniper. That's also what the AI now does. Or if it has no tanks, it sends heavy artillery fire to the assumed sniper position. In some missions the AI has also sniper units under it's command which are used in counter-sniper.

There is also a great change in the art of war. The artillery is again a very deadly weapon but not so deadly as in the predecessors. In addition to that the enemy has no so much artillery, but more trenches and fortified units. Instead of long artillery duels fast tank assaults set the strategy. Small pushes to wipe out a tank or to destroy a convoy are the order of business. But what is a WWII-strategy game without big tank battles? In some missions the 3rd Reich sends out it last tank troops (e.g. in the Battle of the Bulges) and then large battles took place on your screen. Tanks with infantry assault your lines, while artillery bombards your troops. Your own troops fight against the approaching enemy so that you can make a counter attack to destroy the artillery. The great battles look gorgeous!

Beside these two major improvements there is a couple of small, but also great differences:

• You have full control of the fighter-bombers. Guess a couple of heavy tanks is approaching to our damaged units. You order some fighter-bombers to stop them. OK and then a Wirbelwind arrives the battlefield. The Wirbelwind is not a thread to even a heavy damaged tank, but it will take out the fighter-bombers within seconds. In the origin game you must have quiet a lot of luck. Now you just order your planes to attack the Wirbelwind. Seconds later the Wirbelwind lay down as a wreckage and your planes are flying yet.
• Not all of the mission goals are battle goals like destroy x, conquer y or such things. There are very few logistic mission goals, where you have to send a number of troops to a specific location.
• By the way: You don't have to fulfill all mission goals. Some of the goals just help you in fulfillment of your main mission goal (e.g. the side goal is to conquer a fuel depot, effect is that enemy tanks are removed from the battlefield. Hey, have you ever tried to move a tank without fuel?). Other goals are just for fun goals. They have no effect, besides a better rating (and more fun for you).
• There are new medals, waiting for you. Yes, I know. It's just a small thing, but one bad thing in Burning Horizon was that there were no new awards.

The Bad
It is a surprise for me, but the game is too easy. In the end game I had nine heavy tanks, all with elite status and the air superiority. The enemy has not enough heavy tanks or antitank weapons to destroy any my tanks and fortified positions are wiped out easily be either heavy bombers or fighter-bombers. Especially the heavy bombers are nearly invulnerable. Planes like e.g. the B-17 cannot be reached by light anti-aircraft guns and armed enough to shot down enemy fighters (and not become shot down by them).

One of the mission takes place on Omaha Beach at D-Day. A mission where you need no skill. Assault with your infantry (you have no tanks) the bunkers and anti-aircraft guns to win the first part of the mission. Afterwards send in your air-force to smash up the counter attack. Exciting like knitting, where in hell is my coffee?

The Bottom Line
A very good and often times very fast strategy game, which is unfortunately to easy in the end-game. However, the improved AI is much better than the original AI from Blitzkrieg and now is really a challenge. I wonder what happens if the AI have real weapons and I have no more elite units. I guess that will be a very tough battle.