Order of War

The Good
First impressions are what count when it comes to playing a game. I had recently been playing Men of War, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, all these games require a bit of brain power to be able to play and complete. This one I'm afraid fails to draw more wattage in my brain, but instead puts it into power saving mode. But let me talk about the good things.

Firstly the graphics are decent in high resolution although you would have to have a decent graphics cards especially when you have hundreds of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy.

This real time strategy game, feels almost like an attempt to put World in Conflict game-play into a WW2 situation, but does not accomplish this. You are given primary and secondary targets that you have to over come and once these goals are achieved the mission completes and you move on to another scenario.

The Bad
The game play feels pathetic and no real clever planning is required as with other games of the genre. You are basically selecting your units which you can hardly see when zoomed out and then dragging them onto the enemy target you need to destroy. No real tactics required, except maybe placing one unit to attack from the side and the other frontal will mean you will lose less soldier. So, just select and attack and watch...yawn.

I got so bored and irritated with this especially at the beginning where an irritating general screams at you that you are taking to many casualties and then continues sending you endless streams of reserves including lots of tanks and soldiers which I just used as gun fodder. There is a bunker with machine gunners and an 88 next to it, what do you do? just left click a company of soldiers to and right click to attack the 88 and do the same to a tank squad to attack the bunker . If they get destroyed, don't worry new squads will come from nowhere to save the day. Maybe I would be more tactical if my reserves were limited or ran out at the beginning but so far they don't seem to. (kind of command and conquer style).

I don't normally play like that but this game forces you to do that, and to occasionally zoom in to look at what the heck is going on down there and to check out some of the very nice looking tank models. I also tried to rush through these initial levels believing that maybe they are tutorial in nature, but alas, the d-day landings gave me heart burn and I sacrificed those poor rangers with unnecessary Conan the barbarian frontal attacks which were probably not necessary but would have made the Japanese proud. I still got all my medals as well.

Taking a town is also irritating and disorganized, just select your units from one side and select the other from the other and fight your way in by right clicking on the red circles where there is an enemy concentration and once again, if you can see what is going on sit back and watch and occasionally change the direction of fire when a sneaky tank comes around the corner.

In all fairness, I have not progressed very far, I still intend to do so, (just to look at the different unit models) but I am definitely not impressed with what I have already seen and the battle scene definitely did not blow me away.

The Bottom Line
Some people will love the game, professional reviewers have given it around the 70% mark, I would give it about 50% only because of the decent looking tank equipment models which I can actually recognize without reading their labels.

Maybe it gets better as you progress, but I very much doubt that. Blitzkrieg 1 was far more entertaining than this.