SGS Operation Hawaii Reviews

[h1]Overview[/h1] While the concept of the game is good, the mechanics are not intuitive. [h1]Positive Aspects[/h1] The choice of cards affects options. There is a penalty in Victory Points (VP) for playing cards. You can make the game harder or easier if you are willing to pay the VP penalty. [h1]Negative Aspects[/h1] The game mechanics are not intuitive. I keep having refer to the video tutorials.

It doesn't matter if you do or don't score victory points because the game may or may not continue, and you may or may not lose regardless of the outcome. Your aircraft may attack and cause no casualties and receive none in turn, but they are routed nonetheless. Playing cards makes no difference towards your efforts either because the AI always seems to have more and better. Is SGS ever going to finish a game they create? It's Saturday 07 September 2024, turn 7, and as the Japanese I'm winning 26 to 0. I'm about to give reinforcements to a unit and the game stops and I am unable to continue without quitting the game entirely, and there's no point in trying an autosave because it just drops you back into the same hang. Fuck you, SGS.

Looks like it had promise, but how combat works is obtuse even with the tutorials. Does combat strength even matter if it's just trying to get low numbers? How does attack and defense factor into rolling? Second, the game becomes unplayable around turn 4-ish when you AI has to place its own troops. You have to do a bit of clicking on the AI's turns but either the AI wouldn't place its own troops and keep the turn moving or where the player has to click is unclear.

Feels more like a DLC than a game. Afrika korps/Tunesia both have full campaign options that last for 40+ turns, then side campaigns of 10-20 turns that are the phases of the main campaign. I would describe Hawaii as one of those phases of a larger game (because it only has the one campaign of 18 turns) except that it throws out some core mechanics that the other games revolve around, specifically supply. They make sense of this by, instead of the campaign being months long or sometimes the better part of a year, the game only encompasses a handful of days. That's all fine and good, except now there are supply markers on regions that only serve the purpose of possibly confusing new players and messing with old ones from the other games. (my first run, i made sure to keep my lines open because i didn't know it didn't matter; inadvertently ruining the run (you need every soldier as japan)) The difficulty: Playing as japan is understandably very difficult. However, it is made even more difficult by the low moral of your opponent. Although it makes advancing incredibly easy, it also makes it very hard to actually eliminate US forces. It *Seems* to be an attempt to resolve this by making all Japanese troops act as if they are mechanized (i.e. can move after winning a fight) however, it does doesn't help either because the US troops immediately retreat before you can do any damage. Coupled with being out of supply not doing damage to units, it is nearly impossible to pin and eliminate US troops, ultimately leading to several overwhelming stacks that your battered troops have no hope of defeating. In essence, the only reason i was capable of winning my second game (as japan by a single VP 24-23) revolved solely on the fact that the US troops aren't very aggressive. They had three stacks perfectly capable of wiping me off the island, but they just sat the the cities and did not attack. As Japan, you do get a lot of aircraft though; that is a plus. Although, they are pretty useless. Very quickly you will annihilate the American aircraft and battleship row, then you have a bunch of air that seems very useful, but in reality will do very little. You might think that you can use them to eliminate those stragglers i was talking about, but you'd be wrong because you can retreat from aircraft. (that's less of a criticism of Hawaii and all the games to be fair, it really does hurt the effectiveness of air in all the titles) Ultimately, i don't recommend it for $9.99. I beat it once in two hours and feel no drive to play it again (i probably still will eventually). If it goes on sale, maybe. I would recommend either of the Afrika titles long before this, for 14 more buckaroos you get 12+ more hours of gameplay if you're quick about it.

As a strategy player, I like new topics and original ideas and gameplay. This Operation Hawai brought me something I have seldomly seen... something genuinely fun, innovative and intelligent.

I found the gameplay to be pretty good. My first play through was as the Japanese and at first I thought the US AI was fairly passive, but as the turns went I found my units halted while the US AI slowly gave ground until it had overwhelming force and thoroughly thrashed my units about turn 13. Mechanically I thought the way that air units are moved was clunky, but beyond that I found the flow of the game to work well.

TL; DR: Very efficient and enjoyable modeling of a cool "what if" scenario from WWII. Highly recommended, especially if you are familiar with prior SGS games. This is a smaller game but it continues to build the excellent list of war titles from SGS. The game worked flawlessly. I think that some of the negative reviews may have resulted from not being familiar with SGS's system. This system is unique and there's a bit of a steep learning curve, but after you understand it it is an elegant and efficient way to model war themes. SGS has also shown willingness to create games based on lesser known historical battles and situations (eg, Spanish Civil War), which is refreshing. If you like this, there are a number of new SGS games ready to hit Steam over the next few months.

A really unique subject for a wargame. A really great looking map makes this game a joy to play on. This covers the land battle as the main feature. Some really interesting events affecting both sides adds depth to the game. The limitations imposed on the US forces seems a little overdone in my opinion as I play the US in my first game against my good friend Tiopepe2. So if you are looking for a WWII Pacific wargame with a twist...then OP Hawaii is for you!