Arma 2: Oh dear...

It looked like an exciting game, but there is nothing more boring than regularly losing progress and having to re-start due to crashes. Unfortunately, this is what is now happening on an all-too-frequent basis as I play Arma 2. A quick glance at the forums indicates that I am far from alone in this experience, despite the game having been patched 3 times (one helpful suggestion was that I turned off hyperthreading in the BIOS of my i7 - yeah, like that's why I bought an i7). I'm still convinced that there is a great game in here somewhere, but if the devs can't make it a lot more stable then it'll soon be consigned to the bin...

Arma 2: Unforgiving

Having taken a break after the rigours of reviewing HOI3, I thought I would have a go at a very different type of wargame, Arma 2. (By the way, you have to enter your birth date before you can access the site, a check I seem to have passed...)

Here my first impressions:

• Looks great - I'm running it on the highest settings, with just a little slowdown in some areas where there are buildings. Can be fun just getting your squad to drive you around in the Hummer, while you enjoy the view.
• Steep learning curve, not helped by the (standard these days) hopeless manual - search the forum for advice (note that you have to register to be able to search).
• Some bugs - like many others, I couldn't 'trigger' the end of the first mission of the campaign, having to resort to going to the console (left-shift + numpad minus) and typing 'endmission'. Not good.
• Having said that, the restrictive objectives of that mission are mostly gone on the next mission, where you are given a free hand to look for a particular enemy - the game really takes off at this point.
  
• Lastly, and I can't emphasise this enough, the game is UNFORGIVING. If you expose yourself to the enemy YOU WILL BE KILLED, period. What is more, there is none of this running around for health packs - you might have time before you die to get another squad member to heal you, but probably not. And if you think that saving often is the answer, the game only gives you a limited number of save slots, so choose wisely.

I found the game so frustrating at first, with its steep learning curve and unforgiving nature, that I very nearly gave up and wiped it from my hard drive. I'm glad I persevered as, despite its faults, Arma 2 is clearly a great game, and a step-up in realism from the usual action shooters.

Hearts of Iron III Review

Where does one begin with a review of a game like Hearts of Iron III (‘HOI3’)? The first problem, as with all Paradox games, is that reviewing it is a bit like shooting at a moving target. The game has only been out a couple of weeks and already there have been two patches, with another due out shortly. Each patch deals with various issues that the fanbase has raised and will often make a small but significant change to gameplay, so the game that I am reviewing now will be a somewhat different game after a few patches have been released. For the most part, this review is based upon version 1.1c of the game.

On the subject of the fanbase, the Paradox forums have been full of the doom and gloom merchants who pop up whenever a new Paradox game is released. We get the usual posts along the lines: “I’ve found a typo in one of the dialogues – this is a GAMEBREAKER!” No it’s not. Calm down. OK, there may be more bugs in the released game than in titles from other companies, but Paradox are a relatively small outfit. They don’t have the resources of the big boys. Instead, they listen and engage with the fanbase, unlike most other games producers. They clearly have a passion for their games, and want to give their customers the best gaming experience possible. So, if there’s something you don’t like about the game, make a reasoned constructive criticism and the chances are that Paradox will listen. In this way we all end up with a product that is probably considerably better than the original game would have been even without bugs.


Ok, enough of the rant. The second problem with reviewing a game like HOI3 is that it is HUGE. The game divides the world into an incredible 15,000 provinces and gives you the opportunity to control just about every aspect of just about every country in the world between 1936 and 1948. Naturally, this can be rather daunting to newcomers to the Hearts of Iron series, but HOI3 eases the micromanagement burden by enabling the player to hand over any part of their county’s affairs to AI control, including the military. The clever thing about this is that even if you hand over everything to the AI it still feels that you are taking part, rather than just watching the computer run a simulation, as you get to direct the military’s overall objectives, in much the same way as a leader at the time would have done. For example, playing Germany in the September 1939 scenario you can simply tell your forces in the east to take Poland, and they will proceed to do just that (don’t forget to tell your forces in the west to defend against the French, who will happily stab you in the back if you don’t).

This, of course, raises the question: how good is the AI? Again, the forums throw up the usual complaints that the AI comes up with crazy things like Mexico invading Germany, or whatever. To that I would make two comments. Firstly, the game is not intended to be a historically accurate simulation of the events of the Second World War. If it were, it would be boring and have no replay value at all. Instead, the game is a sandbox set at the time of WW2, where you can play endless ‘what if?’ scenarios and watch events play out differently every game. The second point is that I think people expect too much of the AI in computer games. A comparison to chess was made in the forum. Yes, chess AI can now beat world champions, but that is because chess is played on a 64 square board with two sides and 32 pieces, and programmers have been working on chess AI for about the last 40 years. HOI3, on the other hand, is played on a 15,000 ‘square’ board with 100+ sides and goodness knows how many unit types, and has been developed by a small company over a couple of years. On that basis, I have to say that the AI is pretty damn impressive. For the most part it seems to carry out your orders reasonably well, and it does a fair job of looking after other countries. OK, some really weird things do happen, but as I mentioned above these are likely to be swatted by future patches.

And on the subject of patches, perhaps the biggest problem reported by users has been slow gameplay, including on high-spec machines. Some of this relates to the speed that time flows compared to previous games in the Hearts of Iron series. Not having played those games, I can’t comment but the second patch has already led to a speed increase, and I understand that slow gameplay is one of the major issues that Paradox hope to address in future patches. For myself, I haven’t really had a problem with slowdown (my machine is quad core 2.67, 4 GB ram, Vista 64), save for occasionally when scrolling across the map, with the result that I might end up in Canada when I intended to be in France. Scrolling with the mouse, incidentally, can be a bit of a pain – often when I go close to the edge of the screen to click a button I find myself unintentionally scrolling the map, which can be a bit irritating. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if you could control the rate of scroll with the mouse, but the option to control it seems to only affect scrolling with the keyboard.

Gameplay is divided into six parts: diplomacy, production, technology, politics, intelligence and, of course, military. Each of the first five has its own screen, and the military plays out on the main map. All I can say to any newcomer before fiddling with anything is: RTFM (see Glossary). The game is difficult to pick up; the options are so great that this is almost inevitable, although there are some areas that could probably be made easier, or more intuitive – another thing that may occur in future patches, or expansions. An effort to make things clearer has been made, for example on the diplomacy screen there is a triangle with Allies, Axis and Comintern at each corner, with all other countries floating around as they gravitate towards one corner or another. This is a reasonable idea, but I’m not sure that it is particularly informative, especially as countries are often obscured by others. The main map now has an outliner in the top right-hand corner telling you what each of your units is doing, and this is a boon, as it was with Europa Universalis III. Access to information is everything in a game like this and, apart from the usual (for Paradox games) comprehensive statistics log, there are various map modes showing all sorts of things including terrain, politics, intel, supply, infrastructure and even weather, which I understand is a new feature for the Hearts of Iron series (obviously, weather can affect movement of troops, as any Barbarossa veteran would bitterly attest). I've read reports that the weather isn't always very realistic (another thing for a patch?), and sometimes I've found that the clouds don't display when they should, but a nice feature nonetheless.

HOI3 is no Crysis or GRID when it comes to looks, but then those games are no HOI3. For a strategy game the graphics are pretty good, and a lot better than some other strategy games I’ve played. I’ve seen HOI2 and can say that the graphics in HOI3 are a definite improvement. The map is a little bit dull for my taste, and sometimes it isn’t always easy to distinguish where one country’s influence ends and another begins. HOI3 now has the option of sprites, which look OK, but sometimes appear to be heading in entirely the wrong direction (incidentally, some users report less slowdown using counters rather than sprites, which makes sense). On higher resolutions, some of the text becomes a little difficult to read, but perhaps that’s because I need a new pair of glasses.

Sound? Well, there are the usual generic sound effects as, for example, battle takes place, although I can’t say that I’ve particularly noticed them (but no doubt would miss them if they weren’t there). The music, however, does deserve comment. I understand that it was all written for the game, in a style appropriate to the period and the country you are playing, and pretty good it is too, although I had to turn the volume down from the (very loud) default, in order to hear myself think out my dastardly plans.

HOI3 does have multiplayer, playable over lan or internet, but this is not something I’ve tried and so I’ll make no comment. Just ensure that your game is patched to the same version as the person you’re playing with!

As I said earlier HOI3 is huge, and any reasonable length review can only scratch the surface. There are many aspects of this game that I haven’t covered, but no doubt if I discover or remember anything of particular note then I will mention it in future posts.

HOI3 is not yet perfect, but it is already a great game. I therefore award it four stars, with the proviso that I fully expect it to be a five-star game after a couple more patches have been released.

RATING:

Blatant Filler

Apologies to anyone foolish enough to visit this blog regularly for the lack of recent posts, but I have been somewhat busy recently (boring work), and what little gaming time (i.e. real life) I've had has been devoted to the mammoth task of getting to grips with Hearts of Iron III. I will do a review of it shortly, but meanwhile here is another screenshot:

Hearts of Iron III: Demo Impressions

Been having a look at the demo for Hearts of Iron III, which was released yesterday, and I thought I would give my first impressions of the game.

Now, I understand from the Paradox forum that a number of people have had problems with not being able to run the demo, or with it running slowly. I sympathise with them - I've been there - but it has so far run faultlessly on my albeit pretty decent rig (I7 processor, 4 gigs of ram), although I can't really comment on the speed of game-days compared with HOI2, as I hardly played HOI2.

I can, however, say that the game looks a lot better than HOI2, although at my screen resolution of 1680 by 1050 some of the text is a little hard to read.

I began by going through the tutorial. I won't give the game away by explaining why, but it is hilarious, despite a number of typos. The only odd thing about the tutorial is that it doesn't deal with actual warfare which, for all but the saddest people, is surely the heart (no pun intended) of the game.

OK, tutorial done, which country to play? Well, with only 4 months to play from the beginning of September 1939 that was a bit of a no-brainer: Germany of course! Who could resist the temptation to invade Poland? To make life simpler I handed over control of everything except the military to AI control (so much for the tutorial), and off I went... With no particular plan other than to advance all my units across the border, I managed to defeat those nasty Poles in about 3 weeks - pretty similar to the real events of the time, although the Russians stayed put.




Having subjugated Poland I turned my attention west and rushed my units to the Dutch border, with the intention of invading the low countries à la 1940. Unfortunately, at that point the French attacked in the south and I had lost several provinces before I could get my main force down there to meet them. When they did arrive they recaptured a couple of provinces but meanwhile the French were breaking through my centre. Thankfully, I was then rescued from further embarrassment by the demo expiring at the end of the year.



Good grief, there is a lot to think about in this game, and I'm talking as a Paradox game veteran. Even without looking after production, technology, intelligence, diplomacy and politics I had great difficulty handling my units properly and keeping track of everything that was going on. OK, I may have done better if I had read the manual, but you know how it is... The best way to learn is to play, and I can't wait.

As you may have gathered, I enjoyed the demo and it has whetted my appetite for the full game, which is released online on Friday. A full review to follow thereafter...