Theatre of War Reviews

no longer works on Win 10 /11

Surprisingly fun with a lot of weird, useless mechanics. Its a really interesting blend of Men of War where you can grab individual soldiers and make them do stuff and Combat Mission where the battles happen on pretty big areas with tanks, artillery, planes, infantry and the way the infantry moves, spots, shoots, misses, aims again, hits reminds me a lot of Combat Mission. However while its an interesting mix of these two games its not a great mix, the game isn't necessarily bad but if you wanted realism you're better off playing Combat Mission and if you wanted more control over soldiers and better, more reactive and immediate control then you're better off playing Men of War or even Company of Heroes. +Tons of campaings and tons of missions. I'm really happy that Polish and French campaings are a thing which is usually not cared about in games like this. They're a lil unbalanced I'd say but thats to be expected. +The maps are great. They're big and I mean pretty damn big there's a lot of different ways for you to move. +The graphics are great, controls are easy, the game ran without any issues, sounds are alright. +Probably one of the few games at least with the scale that its in where I felt like infantry and tanks actually supported each other incredibly well when used properly. One of the few games where the idea of combined arms warfare really seems to work in game. In some other games with a big enough tank you can take on enemy tanks, enemy squads, clear trenches by just a few well aimed shots and the only things that can take you down are either the units you don't see that flanked around you or a bigger tank then the one you're using. In here that doesn't seem to be the case at all, its one of the few games where using the different units you have, using them all together seems to make a GARGANTUAN impact. Like yeah in other games using all these things together can make things a lot easier but in here it seems almost impossible to not use them together. The game gives you the units, gives you a big enough map a big enough scale where you can put them both into work together, giving orders is easy enough and the way the units do it themselves is acceptable enough that it just works and when one of these pieces is missing it feels like the entire mission just crumbles on your head and you lose. -The game is similar to Men of War in the sense that you can grab individual soldiers and make them do shit individually however because of the larger scale battles, bigger maps, slow reaction time by the soldiers in both receiving your orders and actually doing the order, the issues the soldier has in spotting, aiming etc. all of this makes the individual soldier control mechanic useless. Yeah similar to Men of War rather then having an AT unit you can just have an AT soldier within an unit and you can use that AT soldier to go hunt down tanks but unlike Men of War everything is very slow to respond, slow to happen that it ends up being suicide. -On the other end of the scale its not trying to be super realistic with its spotting and units moving, taking cover, etc etc. Its not trying to be Combat Mission levels of simulation but at the same time the battles, the maps are so big and the units, the soldiers, the tanks act so similarly to Combat Mission units that you get the feeling that its supposed to be similar, supposed to be more realistic then what it really is. The game is stuck in between being Men of War where you can order individuals, everything is fast paced, orders are received and obeyed immediately and being Combat Mission where it takes time for soldiers to receive orders, to move, to take cover, to start spotting enemies etc. -Your units are very suicidal and at the worst of times too. Like I said in the last positive point the way your units go about handling things is acceptable but its definitely not great. Sometimes they just turn their brains off for no reason and I can't figure out how to prevent it. -After each battle you'll be provided with a list of every single soldier that survived the battle. They all have their own ranks, medals and skills. If an unit did really well in battle he'll earn a lot of points which you can use to improve him like improve his shooting, spotting, driving even etc. This is absolutely useless. It takes so much time and feels useless because the points you spend on improving their shooting skills for example doesn't seem to matter that much and they're all so squishy from the infantry to the tanks that it seems useless to try and create a perfectly trained unit or anything. Its a really weird mix of trying to be big scale, realistic, you can't win a war without casualties kind of thing and at the same time small scale, quick, every single soldier matters kind of thing. It doesn't work out very well and it feels like if the game focused all on realism or focused all on quicker, more arcade-ish gameplay it would have been better. But its definitely not bad, I enjoyed my time with it. If you're looking for something more realistic, more on the simulator end of the scale go for the Combat Mission series. If you're looking for something more arcadey go for Men of War or Company of Heroes. If you've played all of em and wanna try out something new then you might enjoy Theatre of War.

A fun tactical game. Pretty difficult though, the game lets you chose any campaign for the start (listed in chronological order) and the Polish campaign is pretty hard if you play in historical order. (Allegedly it's even the hardest.)