Customer Reviews

Axis & Allies

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is the original Axis and Allies computer game. It is a fun game to play and plays exactly like the board game: units, technologies, game play, are all just like the board game the only thing missing are the pieces. The biggest problem is that the computer players are extremely weak, which means you will not have a good time playing this game alone. A related problem is that during multi-player games some rather strange things can happen, you will definitely need the patch offered at in order to play over the net or via direct connect successfully. So you cannot play it solo for very long and have fun and you may experience problems playing real live opponents, why should you buy this game? Well the game is very, very good at allowing you to practice, using the 'standard' opening moves or perhaps coming up with some new stategies in a quick manner. The game also supports the ability to use a 'time machine' to go back and replay a phase or whole turn over again, allowing you to try various things within a turn. This is extremely nice and no die-hard Axis and Allies board game player should be without a copy of the computer version. Just do not buy this edition of the game...read on...

The game has a new version: Axis and Allis: Iron Blitz Edition. This is NOT an expansion of the regular computer game, it is a complete version that tends to work better and has an expanded editor: Buy the Iron Blitz version of Axis and Allies, not this one!

One of the best map board-based war games of all time, Milton Bradley's Axis & Allies is an interesting and very exciting World War II strategy game. In college days of yore, a friend of mine and I bought our first game, with its hundreds of game pieces, dice, rulebook and colorful world map depicting a (very stylized) view of the war situation in the spring of 1942.

Axis & Allies is -- if you can still find a copy, that is -- a beautiful board game to see and play, but its main drawback is that it's time consuming to set up. You can't place your forces at random; each of the five major powers (USSR, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.) has a card telling players where they have to place their initial forces...on color coded regions all over the world. This process alone can take up at least 15 minutes, perhaps more.

Another problem was the duration of game play. Depending on one's grasp of the basic rules and analytical skills -- and my analytical skills were, back then, pretty rudimentary -- a single turn could take up more than 15 minutes, since each turn is divided into various steps (Weapons Development, Unit Purchase, Combat Moves, Non Combat Moves, and Fund Collection). Depending on your strategy and tactical realities at any given point, you can skip most of these if you have no viable options -- just don't forget to collect your funds, but in most cases the player who neglects a step can find him- or herself in deep trouble. That's one reason turns take so long. (The other is, of course, that you have to physically move the pieces, consult the game card and/or the rule book and roll the dice. As a result, if your circle of friends doesn't include a very patient war game enthusiast, your board game version of Axis & Allies will end up sitting in a closet gathering dust.

Fortunately, Axis & Allies was popular enough that the now-vanished MicroProse Software (original publishers of Sid Meier's Civilization series, as well as Silent Service II and the F-15 Strike Eagle series) adapted it to the more versatile and easier to manage CD-ROM format in the late 1990s.

While the board game's highly stylized (and simplified) map and its bright color coded spaces remain the same in the computer version, memory constrains forced the MicroProse/Hasbro Interactive/Infogrames programmers to make some compromises. For instance, infantry units in the board game were made to resemble soldiers of their particular nation-state; British soldiers wore their distinctive WWI-style helmets, while German soldiers wore their coal scuttle "Fritz" head gear. In the PC game the soldiers are generic but color-coded. However, to make up for this, players' planes change their appearance when Weapons Development attempts result in long-range or jet-powered aircraft.

Otherwise, the basics of the game remain the same. Players can still build up their forces and launch multiple campaigns. Combat is still resolved by rolls of the dice, and the results are still determined by each unit's attack/defense points. (Example, an Infantry unit attacks at a paltry roll of one, but defends at two, reflecting the advantages of being dug in and fortified.)

The beauty of the PC version is that you can play it solo against the PC or in multi-player mode over the Internet or even as a "hot seat" game. Setup is no longer a tedious chore; just place the disc in the drive and you are good to go. You can save the game at any point during a turn, something not easy to do in the board game (unless, of course, you have a dedicated game room and took notes on what transpired during the last turn!)

Axis & Allies' artificial intelligence player(s) can be adjusted from Easy to Difficult by choosing a particular general and rank (Eisenhower and four stars being the best for the Americans, just to give you an example), so this version is good for novice players as well as veterans of the original board game. Furthermore, the cinematics used in "cutscenes" -- showing, say, a submarine making an attack or a squadron of bombers carrying out a raid -- are, even for a 1996-98 vintage game, impressive.

Because Axis & Allies is an old game by PC game standards, even though I ordered it here on Amland I had to buy it used from a Marketplace seller, so I did not get a handy manual that explains the rules (although the board game rules can be a helpful substitute, the PC version's rules have resolved some nagging issues that plagued board game players) or the various FAQ's about mouse controls and the like. Not that it's hard to figure out...I am no tech wizard and I have figured most of those issues on my own. Infogrames (which owns what once was MicroProse/Hasbro Interactive) also has a download section on its website (www.infogrames.com) that has patches to fix a few bugs that affect both the game's appearance and playability.

Axis and Allies is deffinately one of my favorite computer games. Although their have been many complaints of bugs on this game, it is well worth the money (you can download a patch for the bugs) This game offers good historical features of World War II, and anybody who likes World War II gaming will love this game! Even though a good game, I still enjoy the board game better. This game features excellent unit pictures and map, and will teach you a lot when it comes to stragety. (This game is all about stragety!) Although I would recommend the new "Axis and Allies Iron Blitz" Addition. It comes with many more features, including much better unit pictures historically accurate to the country's nationallity. It also comes with a much better computer intellegence. Overall, this game is a blast, and anybody who loves stragety games will not regret this game. Get it!

"Axis and Allies" is a classic, well-balanced wargame that is easy to learn and play. It offers fantastic interaction between allies and manages to convey some of the complexity of strategic decision-making without bogging the player down in details like logistics or politics.

This software, however, is one of the worst-written things I have ever seen. It even plays like it's not object-oriented, the same parameters being controlled in different ways on different screens. It is full of bugs that are resolved by none of the available patches. In the Iron Blitz version, for example, if you are the defender in a naval battle and your only unit is a destroyer, the enemy's submarine hit will freeze the game because it does not check to see if there are units left to receive normal hits. When I complained about this bug, Tech Support told me to replace my video drivers! Pretty useless advice from a bad Tech Support Dept.

The AI, is, of course, simply horrible. If I were that bad, I wouldn't play. The AI lacks agression and buys pointless units. This game is not that hard to play, there is no excuse for this shoddy software.

It is playable with other humans, but Hasbro should rewrite it from scratch, using skilled coding and modern technique, because this implementation is not worthy of such a great game, or even of Hasbro itself. If that company's toy cars were so poorly designed and manufactured, the company would likely be defunct.

This title is out of print and almost impossible to find. That said, it is possible to pick up copies second-hand. So here are a few pointers: 1) This version of this game has been accused of being "rushed out the door". Gameplay is OK, AI is weak, parts were pretty buggy. The bugs have largely been fixed if you download the latest patch. 2) There's a second, "iron blitz" edition which is also out of print. 3) Hasbro is addressing all this by planning a new version (Axis & Allies II), expected in december 2001.

Why is it better?
The computer handles all the bookkeeping, movement, combat, etc, allowing you to play a whole game very quickly. You don't have to move the pieces manually or keep track of your money. Things move much faster.

Why is it worse?
The AI is very buggy and very poor. A decent human player can win as any nation against the best computer opponents. In a marathon session I won as each country in under two hours. A second problem is it's a bit tougher to get a good overview of the entire map without a lot of scrolling, so some areas may be overlooked easily.

On the whole, if you enjoy the board game, this is worth a few dollars. You can get an A&A fix anytime you like, and the hotseat function allows 2-5 players play the game in about 1/3 the time of the board version.

It's too bad that such a great fun board game can't translate to CD-ROM without being full of bugs and glitches (and that's from playing against the computer, not even counting internet play). Still, there are good things to say about the game: it's easier to play than the board version, there are many rules variations to make it almost infinitely challenging, map graphics are true to the original and the spirit of the game is in no way compromised, plus you don't have to do any of the laborious set-up chores and general minutiae of the board version.

Hasbro has already put out one patch. Here's to hoping they can release another for this game.

I was excited when the computer game version of my favorite board game came out. It does a good job of following the movement of military pieces, the game turns, and the sequence of events. Playing the game in the multi-player format from a single computer works wonderfully and I enjoy that thouroughly. The artificial intelegence of the computer players is lacking and I have never lost to the computer yet. Also, the longer the game goes the computer cheats in the favor of the human player. When the computer purchases new peices the computer only places apx. one half of the pieces it purchases giving the human opponent a definite advantage as 100% of those pieces are placed. If you are playing with friends it is a great game, if you are playing the computer it is somewhat dissapointing, but still worth the purchase price.

I think this a fairly good implementation of one of the all time great WWII board games. It's takes good strategy, military tactics, economics and some luck to win consistently. Playing against the AI is a little too easy. I hope that they decide to upgrade the game to use the revised rule set and fix the bugs and problems with the AI. To make the AI more challenging, have it play Axis, set Russia Restricted, Axis Advantage and put more German infantry in Eastern Europe and Africa. Better yet, find a human opponent to play with.

Even after applying the latest patch for this game (there have been three of them so far), I still experience frustrating bugs while playing against the computer. I've gotten to the point now where I don't even use submarines because attacking with them will cause the game to crash almost 50% of the time. Overall, the game feels like it was rushed out the door about 6 months before it was truly finished, and I really have to wonder if Hasbro did any extensive play-testing of this product before it shipped. Trust me, if you buy this game, you will be dissapointed.