2 sides, 8 nations, and one battlefield: Europe!Wargame: European Escalation is an intense and spectacular Real Time Strategy game, where realism and strategy are brought to the front lines.
With a phenomenal range of vehicles and units (over 350 different models), build your army and enter a huge military campaign across Europe of the 80's, as the Cold War is about to become World War 3.
With the powerful IRISZOOM , Wargame offers breathtaking graphics and battles as spectacular as they are strategic. Prepare to bring hundreds of units of all kinds--tanks, helicopters, squad Infantry, etc.--under your command in intense battles on gigantic maps stretching up to 150 km²!
Online service EugenNet (c) provides a full multiplayer experience with creation of clans, organizing games, and world rankings where up to 8 players can compete simultaneously in massive battles involving hundreds of units!
System Requirements
Minimum Specifications:
OS:
Win 7, Vista and XP
Processor:
AMD/INTEL DUAL-CORE 2.5 GHZ
RAM:
1024 MB (XP)/2048 MB (VISTA/7)
Hard Drive:
10 GB
Video Card:
256 MB 100% DIRECTX 9 AND SHADERS 3.0 COMPATIBLE ATI RADEON X1800 GTO/NVIDIA GEFORCE 7600 GT OR HIGHER
Additional Info:
Steam account required for game activation and installation.
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
EDIT: Before you read further, read this: After reading on some forums a bit more it appears that this game may contain at least some part of the formerly dreaded non-Steam DRM known as Starforce. Lot's of people hate this DRM because it used to be notorious for destroying hard-drives, however, that version of Starforce is not used at all anymore that I know of. Supposedly, it is only used to monitor activations (assuming it is actually present at all) or something but I don't know nor do I care. The game is excellent and I've had not a single problem with it or anything else on my computer since the install but you might care, a lot of people do.
Bumped up from my initial 4 stars because it is a truly impressive game. Also, after reading around the net it looks like this game is going to be getting a lot of extra work done to it so that's good. It's not buggy or anything but I hear there's talk of expanding the SP and some additional tweaks in the works. They really did hit a homerun with this one!
Back to the original review:
Finally, good RTS that isn't stuck in the rut of World War 2 and it's about time! Don't get me wrong, I like WW2 games but enough is enough and the moderm warfare games in the RTS genre just don't cut it. World in Conflict almost cuts it but... eeeeh....
I bought this yesterday against my almost concrete rule of never spending more than $20 for a video game but this one was worth it. It would have been worth it at more than the $36 it cost. It is very, very good. Don't believe me? Go see some You Tube videos of it which is what sold me on the game. My thanks to KillerFedexGuy...
This is not an easy or casual game at all. The AI is smart and has a knack for exploiting your weaknesses.
Besides the AI, the physics are excellent, the graphics are great and the sound is outstanding, the control interface is fairly user-friendly as far as these games go (although I'd have liked it to be a bit smaller) and not overloaded with options, the battlefields are very large and get this: you can engage at realistic ranges! That's right, none of this nonsense of having to park your tanks 50ft in front of the enemy's tanks just to be able to see them. You can see them coming in the distance and you can even fire on (and hit) them. I know... it's incredible right? Wait til you see it in action.
For some people it's going to have some negatives and they are:
1. It's a Steam game. Oh well... I don't even care anymore. I'm tired of complaining about it. This is the way it is and it's not going to change so we can either get over it and live with it or find something else to do. I choose to live with it.
2. It's a gas hog. I run the game on Windows7 64-bit with a 3.2ghz dual-core, an overclocked GTX550 TI and 8gb of RAM. It gobbles it all up (except for the RAM) when maxxed out and you want to max this dude out because it's a gorgeous game. My guess is that low end cards, weak processors and tiny bits of RAM are going to leave you disappointed with a game that will be ugly and very unstable. As usual, my advice is to put almost no faith in the minimum requirements as they are most often only what's required just to get the game to start at the lowest settings. I haven't actually looked at them but it's usually the case that if you're scraping bottom with your specs you're not going to get acceptable performance.
3. Hard... very hard. After a couple days I decided to add one more star and this potential third negative. There is no difficulty setting in this game. Well, yeah there is actually three settings and they are Launch,Sadistic and Exit. That's it. Yeah, I found that out when I checked to see if Veteran Difficulty was the default setting. Turns out that it kind of is but by God it's worth it just to hear those tank cannons roar and the flak guns... and... and the auto-cannons... oh sweet Jesus....!
Cheathappens dot com has a full trainer for download but not without a paid membership. They have a free tease trainer for infinite fuel but fuel will be the least of your worries.
Anyhow, a description of the game itself is already laid out in the product details but here is one man's opinion on whether the game is worth it or not and in short I say it is definitely, beyond any shadow of doubt, very worth it. The singleplayer at least. I haven't played any multiplayer and possibly never will.
Just remember, the game is hard. About Mission 4 it gets downright murderous but it is oh so worth it.
As a late edit: I don't know what passes for good graphics or strategy in some people's minds but this game's graphics are excellent and the need for a solid strategy (tactics, to be more specific) in this game is of paramount importance, as is the need to maintain constant situational awareness. And yes, you will see tiny icons when zoomed out and managing several square kilometers of intense warfare but wouldn't you kind of expect to?
Unlike many games of this genre, WG-EE is very, very realistic. there's some oddball stuff that has to be there to transform reality into a game, but it is one of the best attempts I've seen to replicate what a cold-war-gone-hot series of battles would look like.
Some of the goofy stuff is irritating and needs fixing though - you can't set travel waypoints for your units, so if you're not careful they'll take silly routes to areas exposing themselves to danger. Tanks are much more vulnerable than they should be. Artillery, even observed and corrected, is so inaccurate you might as well throw rocks at the enemy. Apache helicopters that are designed to take hits from 37mm cannon and survive can be brought down by small arms rifle fire! While these, and many other things are irrtating and should be fixed, they are not the most glaring problem, however.
Number 1 biggest irritation that is driving me insane - there's no difficulty modifier, and some of the single player missions are TOUGH to the point of stupidity. I rarely, if ever, cheat, but this game had me all over the itnernet looking for a way just to get past one particular mission that I've invested at least 10 hours of gameplay on without success so far. My son, who is a gaming addict, refused to buy the game to play online with me - "way too hard" was his comment after playing my copy for a little while. Oh, and there's no cheats available by the way.
Another thing that doesn't help with difficulty is an inconsistent left-right mouse click for actions/selection - this will have you dying more than you'd expect, and it is very difficult to remember in th heat of battle.
The game has amazing promise. Spectacular graphics. Very realistic unit performance in many way (mitgiated by some truly stupid/bad/poorly modelled in others). Nicely priced on Amazon. But, be warned, even the most seasoned gamer will find this one very very difficult in single player mode.
I just tonight purchased and downloaded this game as a birthday treat, and my first impression, after playing through the first scenario (a hypothetical encounter on the FRG-DDR border in December 1975 between Bundeswehr [West German] and NVA [East German] units; I played the West German side) is that this could be one of the big games of 2012. The game runs smoothly on my system (FX-4100, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 HP SP1, Radeon HD 6670/1GB) and the level of detail is amazing. As with any game of this complexity, there's a learning curve involved, and I'm still sorting out how to use logistics units properly to refuel/resupply combat units, for example. The basic mechanic of unit movement/combat is simple - almost deceptively so - however; you select your desired unit by left-clicking on it, and right-click on the map location where you want it to go. When an enemy unit comes into range, your units will fire automatically at it if it's within range.
I said "deceptively simple" because there's a LOT more to the game than just shoving units around the board, as I observed even in my relatively brief acquaintance. You need to pay careful attention not just to your troops' supply status, but to terrain (and concealment values thereof of various kinds of terrain), morale, and other factors, and you MUST maintain situational awareness of the battlefield around you - I lost one recce vehicle during the battle because I wasn't paying careful enough attention to where the East Germans were. If you're given reconnaissance units, _use them_. I haven't gotten yet to the point where things like artillery and air support are to be introduced, but I'm sure, judging from my play experience so far, that studying how to use them effectively will yield enormous rewards.
The game requires Steam installation, and will update automatically as soon as you've entered your key. Speaking of keys, there are actually two product keys you will need to input - the first one will be given to you by Amazon when you buy the game, and the second one, which comes up when you start the game for the first time, is required for activation of multiplayer capability; you will also need to open a (free) account on Focus Interactive's servers. I haven't investigated yet whether the game is capable of being modded; being so new, modding tools may not have been released yet. If and when they are, though, players can undoubtedly look forward to a huge range of new scenarios (I bet this game would be perfect for creating scenarios based on books like Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising", Harold Coyle's "Team Yankee" and Ralph Peters' "Red Army").
I've been playing NATO/Warsaw Pact wargames in classic "paper map and counters" format since the late 1970's, and it's really good to have a game like this to explore the tactics of what might have been, alongside the classic "World In Conflict". Stay tuned for updates to this review as I get deeper into the game!
EDIT 3/5 - I forgot to mention that the game has an auto-adjust facility that detects your key system components such as CPU, graphics card/driver, and RAM, and tweaks the game's video settings automatically to get the most playable and stable fit for your system. The game's graphics have mainly been set to "middle"/"medium" on my computer by the auto-adjust; I've had no issues yet with stability and the graphics quality looks real good even on "medium" (at least it does to me, but I'm not that fussy as long as the objects look like what they're supposed to look like. :) )
Also, the other reviewer is right about the AI; it's tougher than I expected. I think I got lulled into complacency by the first scenario; I'm attempting the second scenario/first campaign now, where Bundeswehr units have to relieve BAOR units and protect a key Autobahn junction, and so far I've gotten creamed in both attempts. I think I need to use the command stars I got from my first scenario to bring in some antiair units to knock down those pesky NVA scout helicopters that pop up immediately after my units rendezvous with the first British contingent.
