WWII Online: Blitzkrieg

The Good
WWII Online gives you the freedom to go anywhere and shoot anyone. Normal first person shooters send you down "alleys" and there is no diversification allowed. Well this game has broken that mould and you are free to explore! There is also the freedom to walk, drive and fly in most of the equipment available at the time. The rank system allows the more experienced the better "toys" and this saves wasting your countries resources on noobs. The overall experience is absorbing and the players can group in different squads resembling units from that era. I joined the 3rd Panzergruppe and we have over 100 members playing on and off.

The Bad
It can control your whole life it is so addictive. Lag is a problem and if you are up against an opponent with a better spec computer he tends to get the jump on you.

The Bottom Line
If you can afford it give it a go it's excellent. Please do not blame me if your partner leaves you due to excessive game play!!!

The Good
I love the premise. They set up a 1/2 scaled Europe, and they give us WWII weapons and vehicles, and let us play it out all over again with no set missions - rewriting history online. Can the Nazis control America with better leadership? We may never find out with all these glaring bugs.

The Bad
Personally, I don't like the frame rates. On my top end system, flying a plane over an unpopulated town will take my frame rates into the single digits, and often stopping for long periods of time (5-120 seconds), after which I am usually dead. Thousands of other players express problems with crashing to the desktop, an inability to even start a game, and an unheard of load time - up to 10 minutes. And that's just for starters. The game manual is about as thick as a waffle house menu, the graphics are on the same level as some 1993 DOS titles even at the highest setting, not to mention the rifleman that fires backward and into the ground - a bug that hasn't been fixed 2 months into the release. All in all it has the feel that the game is still in alpha testing, and buying the game funded further development.

The Bottom Line
A WWII simulator that has many bugs, many flaws, many shortcomings, and a hard row to hoe to reach greatness. Fun to play when it works, hair pulling when it doesn't.

The Good
WWIIOL has many thing you won't find in any other game, but realism is top notch and unmatched. The game is a massively multiplayer combined arms simulation. That is, it includes air, sea, armor and infantry all in the same virtual world. Realistic ballistics. Realistic damage modelling. Realistic ordinance penetration. Realistic simulation of cover and concealment. Realistic dimensions (5000 meter visual range, not 200 meter as typical in video games). Realistic sound (for instance vehicles moving 1km away sound distant to the point of almost being undetectable). If you love simulations (flight sims, tank sims, and so on), you'll be amazed by this game.

The Bad
Most of the things I didn't like about the game are long past. The launch was horrible. Lag, dated graphics, missing functionality, billing problems, you name it, were present when the game was launched in 2001. But since then, all of these issues have been addressed and then some.

If there's anything to not like, it's that the game is not easy to get started with for new players, and this results in a somewhat limited and very talented player base.

The Bottom Line
WWIIOL has many thing you won't find in any other game, but realism is top notch and unmatched. The game is a massively multiplayer combined arms simulation. That is, it includes air, sea, armor and infantry all in the same virtual world. Realistic ballistics. Realistic damage modelling. Realistic ordinance penetration. Realistic simulation of cover and concealment. Realistic dimensions (5000 meter visual range, not 200 meter as typical in video games). Realistic sound (for instance vehicles moving 1km away sound distant to the point of almost being undetectable). If you love simulations (flight sims, tank sims, and so on), you'll be amazed by this game.