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...