Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe Reviews

WWII was epic. This game reduces the conflict to the essentials. Not easy to win on either side. It is a big game with many twists. A huge challenge. Well worth the price. 8.5/10.

Where to start... Well, since the community brings this up often, yes I did read the manual. I kept it open in a tab for hours to look up whatever I needed. It was often useless and vague or gave one-line descriptions that don't help. The game suffers from its railroading. Not to say railroading is fundamentally bad, but this particular brand of it is awful. Try playing the allies and damaging the German units. You have you HQ nearby, you're in good supply, you try to bomb them? Zero damage. Your first infantry army? Hits for zero damage but takes two damage back. Oh you didn't notice that artillery guns literally do ZERO damage at tech level 1? Well thanks for wasting your limited funds buying one to try and help soften up the enemy. Your tank trades 1 damage for 1 damage. Enemy turn. Germany perfectly cycles units in and out, hits your units for 2-4 damage every turn, even the Italian will do this as they are basically on-par with the Germans at the start of the game (Because historically Italian tanks were so good....), you are guaranteed to lose units permanently every time the enemy takes a turn because they always do a lot of damage and you often cannot even hit back, nevermind chipping away at them. It's an insanely effective cheese tactic that is baked into the AI and you basically cannot replicate it in the first half of the game. Half the game feels weak due to freely spawning things via events. I want to stress I am not criticising the production queue, that's obvious and you can plan for it as it tells you what is coming. But its things like "Oh no I don't have to worry as Britain because it will just freely spawn me 4-5 units in Egypt for the African campaign, defeating the entire point of worrying about shipping units over there". On the other side of the coin, as Italy you can't try and rush Britain in Egypt because they'll just get a bloated pile of free spawns. The USSR gets this en-masse as well once they join the war. What is the point of having a side of the game that is all about purchasing more units if you just keep dishing out freebies? It's hard to keep track of, you don't know when to expect it, and when it happens against you all you can do is sigh and try and cope with something you couldn't know was there before. A lot of the loss in immersion comes from just not being close to historical. The Germans conquered France with better tactics, but they were vastly outnumbered in real life. Why the hell does Germany attack the Benelux before invading Norway? Why the hell is the Norwegian campaign not here and instead Germany gets it all for free?! Wtf is this? Paratroopers feel overpowered as hell. Their transports have the same full 10 health as a proper fighter or bomber, and they are as a result guaranteed to make a successful landing. They are simply far too powerful and can take almost no damage achieving their goals. I'm 90% certain there's a bug with the AI being hyper-conservative with its navy, as Germany almost alway s keeps its navy in the baltic and you basically never see them even attempt to break out to raid you (except for all those submarines they get that are even pre-placed deep in the atlantic in one instance). Is this game unwinnable? No, of course not. But you'll find it's only winnable by complete obliteration of your enemy, overrunning them when they're out of new troops and simply driving around getting free captures of their territory. There's never enough units to form frontlines by the mid-point for anybody. The ranges for planes is very gimmicky. Strategic Bombers of World War 2 went extremely far, requiring heavier longer-range fighters to escort them. Instead it's normal fighters escorting them and the strategic bombers can barely cross the English Channel. They honestly should have +1 minimum range, and probably gain an additional +2 with each level of long range aircraft. There's often blatant ironies about who can go where. The axis can freely traverse Gibraltar as long as they wait one turn, the game literally has a special way added in for them to go past it. But can the UK or France send a single submarine past any route through Denmark? Nope, not allowed. Sorry you just can't raid Axis supply lines from Sweden. Sucks, huh? I strongly wish the game let me swap two units positions if both have the movement range to swap places. It's awkward having to force units to move into clearings in a busy frontline. The experience system seems entirely pointless. You must take losses to get exp, then you lose every single bit of experience to replenishment, not even keeping a shred of it. The decisions of the game basically break apart if you do not wish to control all nations. I tried a Britain only playthrough once, that is to say every other Allies nation is AI-controlled once I end my turn, and almost every decision was missing. France appears to dictate the majority of decisions that lead to British decisions and you don't even pressure them, so you get no Norway events, no Finland event, nothing. Why are so many decisions not available even with full control? Like if I play the UK, why am I forced to lend-lease the Soviets? Why are the soviets guaranteed to mobilize with about 20 free units and declare war in mid-1941 when that wasn't Stalin's plan irl, even if the germans aren't ready to go to war? Why does Japan always get Indochina off-map if France is still alive during the event? And especially, how come there's no impact on the German economy related to oil shortage as the war goes on, especially if they get bogged down early? A personal issue I had with this game was the UI Scaling. It forces me to use my desktop UI scaling. I have a 4K monitor and use 150% DPI Scaling. The game is still difficult to read and play without further scaling and really needs its own internal UI / Text scaling solutions. I want to like this game. I think it sort of lacks any structures related to warfare (e.g. radar installations), and I think there is some really BS imbalance going on. The early game is both punitive and not fun, with many unit types suffering doing zero damage and others being vastly overpowered for what they should be. There's too many freebies dished out, and great excuses for a new front to fight in are just not allowed (i.e. Norway). On a sale, ehh maybe. It could be so much better.