Customer Reviews

Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the type of game that requires a lot of attention on your part. You command literaly thousands of troops and equipment to accomplish your objectives. These could be any one of seceral battles in the Eurpoean theater to the invasion of Iwo Jima to its defense as the entrenched Japanese Army.
Be forewarned that this is not a 'get in and win the battle in thiry minutes' type game. For instance, in landing on Iwo Jima there are two objectives. Take two seperate Japanese command posts on opposite ends of the island. Your troops land on the beaches and your job is to move them up the beach to engage and take cover. Tanks and halftarcks, etc to follow by the way.
I made plans to take the first objective and fond that you have to keep an eye on your troops because if you fail to do so they take the least path of resistance land/obstacle wise and end up getting slaughtered by entrenched Japanses machine gunners in trenchs along the beach. You have the ability as a bonus mode to call in naval artillery and airstrikes but these come up occasionally and aren't always readily available so use them wisely. As with 'real life' shell or bomb and area where resistance is tough and then advance your troops in the 'cautious' or 'attack' mode. Once you have your troops in cover or trenches you can switch to 'defensive' and have them hold their ground.
If you're looking for long (maybe up to a couple of hours or more) of real strategy battle tactics using riflemen, flamethrowers, machine gunners, officers, medics and engineers supplemented with tanks, halftarcks, jeeps, planes, bombers, artillery both land and naval then this game will give you a true "Armchair General" experience. Not recommended for kids or those with short attention spans or those who play first persons shooters constantly.
Another very similar game is Theater of war. If you've tried that you'll enjoy this one but with even better graphics.

Good Graphics, AI try to attack you with different manners, realistic tactics i.e: First objective in Normandie is the train stations, located north of the aerodrome and radar site if you take them the germans receive less reinforcements (think it happened on real life). This game is not easy, you need to build some defense lines and wait more troops come to the beach to try some advance ! This is great because one board took a lot of time to finish! The only con I saw is the famous Tiger tank (if you dont have artillery, bazookas and a lot of soldiers in trenches you cant stop them, kind hard but funny!). Sometimes you have more than 4000 troops to command and you will need a good pc to suport this game, lags can occur if your video board dont have memory enough I'm using one nvidia 9800 gts. Some users complain about the time to receive the msg about objective accomplished but if you dont clear all the area, you never will receive the msg . War is not easy, no pain no game !

This game is not for common consumption. Only those truly dedicated micromanagers that loved the pervious sudden strike games.

I have mixed emotions about this game. It should have been excellent, but falls short. I'm big fan of WW2 tactical games, example Blitzkrieg, so was very excited to try out Sudden Strike 3. This is tactical game, since there is no strategy involved: you make choices within fixed map and no base building/resource gathering. Graphics is very nice. You will have hundreds of units on screen at a time. Scale and attention to detail are amazing. My problem is that with so many units it is very difficult to control them since they are not organized in platoons. Sure enough you can assign groups yourself, Ctrl-1 and etc, but it takes forever. Normandy invasion mission of allied campaign is a good example. Equipment arrives on shore and it is a total mess. Units by default move to attack and not hold positions and tanks will get knocked out before you manage to switch "hold position". You will spend a lot of time forming fire teams and platoons to have at least one MG, one AT, one Sniper per team and it takes forever. Path finding is another problem. Your units will never figure out that you want them to take short route.

My recommendation is to skip it and try Men of War instead.

Kind regards,
- Skeptic.

This was an impulse buy went wrong. I admit that I was taken in by the flashy box cover and screen shots, but in the end, it just didn't deliver that much. The graphics are great, and the interface is easy to learn, but even on "easy" the missions seem very difficult and unreal. The AI always has an unrealistic advantage, and even with all the patches installed, it seems there is a glitch getting the game to recognize when you have actually achieved an objective. This is very much like the great BLITZKRIEG! family of games, and if you have them, you don't need this.

To run Sudden Strike 3 Arms for Victory, you MUST update the copy protection drivers. The game uses the pain in the rear TAGES protection system. You have to download the latest version of those drivers, install them, then uninstall then install again to insure the old drivers are removed and then the new ones installed. Once complete Sudden Strike 3 will run just fine on Windows 7.

Do not waste your money on this game. Units do not respond to commands. I can't even beat the first level. I would stick to ''Blitzkrieg'' series. TERRIBLE Game.

I waited a long time for this game and it just doesnt live up to the older sudden strikes. Every board is the same, the enemy keeps attacking until the end of the board with no real chance to build your forces even when playing on easy. Big disappointment.