Customer Reviews

Hearts of Iron 3

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

The latest version of Hearts of Iron puts you in control of a country either before or during World War II. You control everything from diplomacy, politics and intelligence, to technology, production and most importantly, warfare. You can play as any one of more than 150 countries (including New Zealand - as a Kiwi, that was fun for me as New Zealand rarely shows up in any games in any meanngful way), all of which are populated by historical figures. All countries are broken into regions (there are more than 14,000 provinces in total) and each is accurately depicted in terms of available resources. Start as New Zealand, for example, and your cabinet will be composed of such contemporaries as Michael Joseph Savage and Walter Nash (bet you've never heard of them....). You'll find yourself short on crude oil but with an abundance of food to trade (and that's about as realistic as a WW2 scenario gets for New Zealand).

As almost every other reviwer has pointed out, with good reason, the campaign map's geography leaves something to be desired (i.e., it sucks). Only Western European cities are placed with any thought to accuracy. New Zealand, Australia and Japan, amongst most others, are sadly bereft of urbanisation. New York is in New Jersey. Los Angeles is missing. Fiji is due east of New Zealand. Go figure. Each nation has a shifting and shiftable political ideology literally triangulated between democracy (Allies), fascism (Axis) and communism (the Comintern). As the appeasement of the mid-thirties evolves into the cold war of the mid-late thirties and, eventually, total war through to the mid-forties, you'll find yourself gravitating toward your natural allies. Unlike other real-time strategy sims, Hearts of Iron III puts great emphasis on historical "accuracy." A curious aside on historical accuracy: Nazi Germany is faithfully recreated but for one detail: The flag of the German Weimar Republic is used in lieu of the Swastika.

The resource limitations set on each nation mean that you'll never be able to directly advance a nation far beyond its capacity or stature within the time-frame given. In other words, if you choose to play as a minor nation like New Zealand, you'll be playing as a small cog from start to finish. However, this in itself adds an interesting element to the game. Other strategy games may allow you to take control of nations or factions with starting disadvantages but the playing field is usually levelled with a few bold strategies. Not so in Hearts of Iron III, which faithfully recreates the sensation that you're a pawn (maybe a well-liked pawn, but a pawn all the same) to more powerful forces.

The game takes place in "real" time with a live pause function: Playing at the fastest possible speed and without pausing will see you completing one day every 24 seconds. But you'll pause. Often. Very very often. For casual fans of the strategy genre, like me, the devil is in the details. Hours of meticulous micromanagement are required before executing any action. If you're approaching the series for the first time, like I did, you will likely be completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of arcane information at your disposal and the learning curve is way steep. You don't just research a new vehicle, you research the armour plating, the engine and the gun barrel - and you'll have to balance that against everything from consumer demand to trade agreements that are in constant negotiation. I didn;t find that to entertaining at first, to be honest, but once I got used to it it was kind of interesting.

Again as other reviwers have pointed out, the processing taking place will bring even a relatively late model processor to its knees. Mine wasn't on it's knees, it was almost on it's face on the floor. As a result you'll occasionally find yourself skipping around the campaign map but it's more irksome than anything else. This is all the more curious when you consider that the hardware usually struggling with any latest-release title is your six months-old graphics card. The graphics for this game are underwhelming, but then the game isn't supposed to be eye candy. The campaign map is 2D, but is superimposed with 3D models representing your armies, flotillas and air forces.

The increased number of provinces greatly enhances the tactical strategy required and the ability to use the map to your advantage: Fret about an unpinned flank or recreate the battle of the bulge by isolating a jut in the enemy's line. Like the nation-building tabs, you can let your field commanders take full AI control of a theatre. Deliver an objective to an HQ and your commander will respond with what resources they require before carrying out your orders with admirable intelligence. As with the nation-building AI, you can always step in and issue orders directly to capitalise on any opportunity you see.

The tutorial is woefully inadequate. A thinly veiled Adolf Hitler walks you through the various tabs, pointing out what each box is, but not how to maximise them. It's low-hanging fruit I know, but Swedish developer and publisher Paradox Interactive would do well to employ a grammar Nazi: The typos and syntactical errors of the text-only tutorials and alerts are about on par with a forum. While it's intelligible, it jars the player's experience and makes the game feel unpolished. In an era where most developers place great importance on user-friendliness and water down their releases in order to make them more palatable to a wider audience, Paradox Interactive's commitment to strategy micromanagement is profoundly admirable.

But it also means that the game will not appeal to a great many consumers.

I'm also a seasoned wargame player, and I wanted to add my voice to the criticisms by other users here. I have played every previous version of Hearts of Iron. They all had their share of problems, and I was hoping HoI3 would be a leap forward. Despite some small welcome improvements, overall I was grossly disappointed. Unlike what favorable reviewers claim, this game has fundamental problems that can't be fixed with just "some patches". Die-hard fans aside, I'm running out of patience with Paradox's approach, for a number of reasons.

Of course this is a monster game, even more so than its predecessors; people who love wargames have a lot of patience, if the game proves rewarding. The scale essentially moved from strategic in HoI2 to operational in HoI3, which would understandably add detail and complexity. But there is a big difference between complexity and unplayability. Paradox's attitude is to keep adding all kinds of convoluted junk and then give the player the option to either (painfully) figure it out or let the AI (poorly) automate it. You often end up micro-managing all kinds of tedious things. A good simulation needs a level of abstraction that will make it beautiful and functional. With every new release, Paradox is feeding into the crowd that is more interested in gadget-fantasy than historical simulation. Can we separately "research" every nut and bolt that went into a German panzer? Can we order around every single US submarine or Soviet spy? We probably can, if we have six years and one day to replay WWII. I, personally, would like to play it over a week, or better, over a long weekend. Think you wanna try letting the AI take care of some things automatically? Great. Soon the AI informs you that it has declared war (on your behalf, without consulting you) on China. Good luck with that.

If the game designers could successfully put together all this excruciating detail, I would certainly give them a hats off. But again and again, despite patches and counter-patches, they have not measured up to the task. As a gamer I hope I am not alone in feeling that

- No, it is not OK to release games with all kinds of glaring problems and insufficient playtesting, invite your fans to play them for hours until they figure out what's wrong, and then promise to publish fixes months later.
- No, it is not OK to keep releasing maps with mistakes that can be picked up immediately by anyone with a basic knowledge of military history (e.g. where is the Kiel Canal in HoI 3 which existed in previous versions?)
- No, it is not OK to have such a large worldwide online community with forums where fans contribute numerous pieces of information that could help you design the next version of the game, only to ignore that and spit out more of the same. I am tired of looking at minor countries (outside the game designers' own Scandinavia) and finding the same gibberish unit names produced by bad translation software, wrong leader names, wrong political parties, wrong orders of battle etc. despite tons of forum contributions and (supposedly) years of background research.

I do want to give this game another chance; but even the graphic interface is so drab that my eyes quickly tire. The old HoI maps were badly drawn based on the Europa Universalis platform. I was hoping that the new map with larger scale would add much-needed detail, but alas, no. The new map is plain ugly: it has numerous mistakes (even in countries' borders!), terrain types are hard to discern, and there are still no roads and railways (they didn't feature in previous HoI versions either). That is no way to build an operational-level WWII game. You don't go to war with crappy maps; you don't make a good historical wargame with crappy maps either.

World War II strategy gaming should not have to be so not-fun. Check out the Making History interface and you'll know what I mean. And if you've been working on the same game title for 8+ years, there is little excuse any more for being sloppy. Fortunately there is a lot of competition in this genre, which I hope will produce better, more playable AND realistic games in the future.

I'm a big fan of the HOI series, and I have spent a lot of hours in the last month playing HOI3. So I have gotten my money's worth. One of the troubles with Paradox games is that people get disgruntled after a hours and hours of gameplay without thinking how low the actual cost per hour is compared to a game that you play once in a weekend and then never touch again. So I think it's fun with all the new innovations, like the AI controlling units, the new research, the new brigade system, and so on.

Now, another problem is that PI releases games that are poorly tested because they are a small company, and they rapidly patch and fix from there. There is also a substantial pool of talented modders that are hard at work. So there are a lot of bugs and some design flaws. But there are workarounds to a lot of them. If someone is playing a PI game without mods, well, then, they don't really know what they are doing. Ignore the arguments about getting what you pay for and the ideal world of software development. This game, and other Paradox titles, are designed to be used with mods and constantly getting patches, like it or not.

So, if you can deal with the bugs, and keep up to date with the mods which change every week or so, this is a very fun game. If not, then you should probably wait a few months, maybe Christmas time or January. It will be worth it for these reasons:

1 - It is already far better than HOI2, even Arma, because the battles are much better designed and more challenging. No more wiping out 30 divisions with a handful of Tac and CAS planes. No more stacks of a million panzers ranging deep into Russia without fear of supplies. No more knowing the exact date when the AI will attack you. And so on and so forth.

2 - The AI has great potential. At times it can be downright ludicrous, at others very clumsy and stupid. But sometimes you can arrange things so that the tactical AI performs great, which takes a huge burden off your shoulders. This is in its infancy but it's better than I've seen in any other game. I'm not talking about the AI you fight against, but assigning objectives to some generals, meeting the force requests from their staff, and then just letting them do their own thing. Makes me feel like a real world leader, not some sort of glorified micro-managing supply clerk.

I am basically an HoI2 addict. I've been playing it for years, and keep on coming back to it. That game, though not perfect, is so close to fine that any flaws I could mention are mere quibbles. I play a game once or twice a month.. All I need to do to lose myself is to cue up Nationalist China or Turkey and two or three hours, and I am utterly copacetic.

When this iteration of the game came out, I was pleased. I expected great things.. Knowing that the game would probably be buggy for a half year or so, I decided to wait for the patches to slake my curiosity.. At a half year, I dropped by this site and a few others, and was dismayed to see that a lot of guys were panning it, hard.. I decided to wait longer, to really let Paradox work it out. For any other game, I would never have bought. For HoI, I couldn't help myself. I had to give it a shot, and hope that I would enjoy it despite the negative word if mouth.

Well, I've played a few games through now, and - even though it pains me to say this - I have to say that the naysayers are right. I really wanted this game to be great. But the game totally lacks the tightness and focus that makes HoI2 work. The tech tree is an amorphous mess, the politics and diplomacy (which in HoI2 are mildly complex, but are focused with neat conceptual synergy) are just sort of there, and felt lackadaisical and haphazard. I played the thing for a few days, kept hoping that it would click, but instead of coming together, I finally just realized I wasn't really enjoying it at all.

The game seems to have been tweaked by the patches- it didn't seem too slow, and the gross grammatical and geographical errors that earlier reviewers complain of, seem to have been fixed.. But like many others say, those details aren't the problem. The game just doesn't work conceptually. And for a big fan of this franchise like me, that really stinks.

I played the demo a couple times until I had a grasp of how the game worked. I probably still would not have ventured to purchase the game without the low price tag. However, I have gotten a lot more out of the game than I thought I would.

If you are looking for a graphics heavy, beautifully rendered game, look elsewhere. This game is basically a board game for your computer. But is a lot more complex than any board game I have played.

You are placed in charge of your country, and you have to deal with many different factors involved. Personally I like all of the attention to detail that is required, although I still have not gotten to the point of factoring in the weather for combat (yes, there is a weather system in game that can affect a battle, just how it would in real life.)

You have to decide how to balance your production, between what you want to build (tanks! etc) and what you need to build (supplies for your troops, consumer goods, need to keep the population happy).

You also get to determine how your country's brightest minds will be employed. Will they be scientists, spies, diplomats or officers?
Scientitsts are necessary to progress and make better units, but you can't neglect your officers or else your army will be less effective. But if you concetrate on those 2, enemy spies may have a field day in your country with free information. And if you have no diplomats, you may find yourself without friends (unless you choose a really powerful country anyway).

The combat system took a while to understand, but the objectives based system can be quite useful. You can set up your armies to protect your country through the AI, while leading the rest of your troops to attack. Or, my favorite, set the AI with objectives to capture key cities, while maintaining a small commando group to wreck havoc nearby.


In order to understand what is really going on, reading the manual is necessary. I like reading manuals, so this was not a problem for me (even if it was the PDF version). But I know some people would rather ignore it.


The down sides for me have been the low quality tutorial and the spelling/gramatical errors.

The tutorial leaves much to be desired in how to actually play the game. It presents the screens invovled, so you have an idea of what you are looking at but not much else.

Some of the spelling/gramatical errors leave you puzzled over what exactly happened in game. After becoming more familiar with the situations, it makes more sense but is still annoying.

I run a Dual Core 2.13ghz processor, 4gb of DDR2 RAM and a 9600 GT OC Video Card on Vista 32-bit.

First off, late me state some key items up front; This game is complicated and time-consuming much like its predecessors. If you like quick action and RTS ala Warcraft then you will absolutely hate this game. Hearts of Iron is like a gigantic game of Chess.

For those that had previously played Hearts of Iron 2 then I would suggest to head to the Hearts of Iron 3 forums as there are some really good After Action Reports and Strat guides to help you make the transition from playing HOI2 to HOI3. The most notable changes that I've encountered has been a new articulated command structure for units which I absolutely love. Essentially, you can create your own Headquarters from the Army Group level down to better manage your armies as well as give instructions to each articulated command structure to accomplish goals. On that note, the AI is very good. I've been impressed so far with its ability to obtain goals and tasks with a vast improvement over HOI2.

Okay, now the bad stuff. This is a Paradox game and if you've never played a Paradox game you have to know that off the shelf it has some bugs and takes awhile for the Paradox community and Paradox itself to hammer everything out. Not to mention the modder community to start putting out mods which will tailor the game to your flavor. So far the major complaints are the CG bug where basically you (or another country) cannot supply its own army, notably in the 1943 campaign as the Soviets and game speed. The computer spams trades so much that lower end computers will get hammered with slowness after awhile. However, On the HOI 3 forums there is already a quickfix for this.

My expierience with the game so far as been in the 1936 scenario and I've had to restart several times due to the VERY steep learning curve. Veterans of HOI2 will notice after a few playthroughs that Intelligence and Diplomacy now have a MAJOR part to play in the game. If you ignore them both you will soon end up with the entire world at war with you in 1939 including the non-historical ones. Ergo, you have to pull off the political masterpieces such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Munich Agreement without getting wailed on too early. For example, my first game I ignored intel and diplomacy and by the time I invaded Poland most of the world was at war with me including Romania, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland. There is possibly a fix in the future but there is no true neutrals in HOI3. Each country can just as easily join the Comitern, Axis or Allies. The Allies go really nuts and will recruit countries like mad if you don't stem the tide with some spies and diplomatic influencing. Tip* If you play Germany, max your spies in the Allies (France and United Kingdom) and set it to "Increase Threat" to stem the tide.

Overall, I've been fairly pleased with the new Hearts of Iron game despite the bugs (which I expected) and in another few weeks to a month there will be some great mods out there. If you want to dive right in then buy it now otherwise wait a couple weeks or a month and you'll get a much more polished game. Pardox pays attention to its customers.

Pros:
- Love the new features like headquarters
- Improved AI over HOI2
- I like the music :)

Cons:
- Some irritating bugs including system slowdown from trade spamming and the CG one.
- Really crappy tutorial (This is the Diplomacy Screen...here you do Diplomatic stuff, enjoy!)

I was looking forward to this new release in the Hearts of Iron series.

Paradox has a good reputation as a company that patches thier games and listens to the customers input on what could be improved. Sadly, they seem to have decided to leverage this heavily and release HoI 3 in pretty much a beta state.

I have hope and a good bit of faith that Paradox will honor thier end of the bargin and patch the game to a condition that is enjoyable to play with a high degree of replayability.

I would advise those thinking of purchasing this game to wait six months or a year and let both Paradox patch it and the modding community tweak it to the game that it should have been on release.

After almost a year on the market, Hearts of Iron 3 still hasn't addressed the glaring bugs that it shipped with, let alone lived up to the promises its promoters made. This game is still a work in progress, and at this pace, it won't be finished until at least 2012. As a game, it isn't fun, since most of the features of the game still have yet to be fleshed out or brought to a semblance of realism. If you are a student of World War II, then it will give you lots to think about at least. The game escaped from beta testing onto shelves, and it seriously damages the reputation of Paradox Interactive that they would not promptly fix the game. Buy a WW2 history book instead - it'll be more fun.

Bad release, not too uncommon from Paradox when there games go gold, but this game as is, from the 1st release out of the box was unplayable really...now on the 3rd Patch it's better..but IMO HOI2 has more play ablitity in it's latest forms/mods...also it's the most ahistorical of all three HOI games least it seems to be that way, The tech tree is complex and vague at the same time, that's one of my biggest irks, also the new army formation, where you "build" division of Regiments or Brigade, which I kinda like in concept, so you can have a Panzer division with 1 Panzer Regiment, and 2 Grenadier Regiments..er brigades is a interesting take, but you are limited in extra support it seems like AA, Artillery, Etc..or maybe I just didn't dig deep enough in the short time I fiddled with a German Campaign to see all the options. Like I said overall could have been great, and maybe still will be, but buyer beware..know what you are diving in with the purchase of this title.

Maybe after the Modders get to work to better it, HOI3 will go from lump of coal to a diamond..the potential is there..I kinda regret buying it early, but the marketing got me, and the lack of cheap wargames out on the market was another factor(I paid 29.99 for my copy) this last month digitial downloads were going for 8.00 for the game.

If you are thinking of quick install and then you go marching off to war, this is not the game for that, least not in it's current state...actually I shelved my copy of HOI3 for the duration, while reading the online forums for improvements to the game, before I pick it back up again.

Since then Matrix's Close Combat The Longest Day, as been my PC vice for the holidays.

Purchased HOI3 in December 09. I incorrectly assumed that its various bugs would have been corrected by now. I had previously played through HOI2 and EU3 (both EXCELLENT games) and had been waiting for HOI3 to go on sale. With the added DLC (not really worth it) I ended up paying around $15. The price was right, but the product... well, it left a lot to be desired. My PC is an i5-750 with an ATI 5850 and 8 GB of RAM... it games... and well, this game seemed to bring it to its knees. Eventually I gave up on finding a solution to the performance problems and stopped playing.

The good:

* It's a grand strategy game... not many people make these now.
* The game seems stable.
* Though complex, I was able to start playing almost immediately.

The bad:

* Absolutely stale graphics... even for strategy games.
* Game runs slow... very slow... even on a brutally fast PC.
* Game seems to slow down the longer your session lasts.
* Maintaining trade agreements seemed pretty tedious (but totally necessary)
* Having to register online was semi-annoying

The verdict:

I don't regret buying it... and I'm still holding out hope that subsequent patches will convince me to resume playing. Paradox doesn't ask a lot for its games and they make some really unique ones... support companies like this! Sorry if the "review" isn't very detailed... it's admittedly been a while since I played the game.