When playing war games, you come across different styles of play that affect your decision-making process on what you like. Theatre of War was one of those games I wasn’t too sure about. I’m inclined toward turn-based strategy war games — more of the thinking man’s chess game. You’re not rushed and can fully plan your moves before letting things swing into action. Real-time simulations usually leave me in frustration since they move too swiftly for my liking.

This was my thinking when it came to Theatre of War. Happily, things turned out differently when I realized there was a pause feature that allowed for planning before letting the hounds of war loose on my game playing. Still, I would forget to use it on occasion when in the thick of battle. Once that happens, you’ll have the usual regrets when the best laid plans go up in smoke and flame.

Since this game has been out awhile, I want to add more of an up-close and personal view of my impressions of the good and bad this game brought to my computer. First on the list is performance. In the majority of my game playing, I really took no performance hits. That’s not to say there were no glitches, but they were so minor as not to be a hindrance. When you have a 2.8 Ghz, dual core computer with 1 GB of RAM, and using Windows XP instead of Vista, that might make a difference. In my case, slow down was very minor what with all the activity going on onscreen. Your system might not agree.

Activity on the screen, i.e. graphics capabilities, was great. There were lots of background details in wooded areas, farm fields, roads, buildings, troops and vehicles. I was wondering if this would take a big hit, as some games will forgo detail just to give you utility. The one problem with this was that you spend most of the time zoomed out so you can get the big picture. Your detail gets lost, and what you get are stick figures, ants, blobs, whatever you want to call it.

An example of what I went through would be that of a Russian soldier firing at a group of Germans. Up close it was really cool, as you saw the soldier kneeling, taking aim and firing his weapon. That weapon even gave you a puff of smoke as the trigger was pulled. It was a shame that it was all lost since you needed to pull back to see exactly where he was shooting. The same occurred when I lost a tank in a field. A direct hit caused flames and smoke to spiral into the air. It would have been great to see it up close instead of looking at it from a distance. That’s not to say you can’t actually see some of these events in motion; you just have to make a decision of how you want to view your battlefield. In some cases, you have to focus in close when you want to give a command, such as attaching and detaching artillery from trucks and having infantry move over to the artillery pieces and man them.

There are lots of details in this game, from the individual soldiers to the vehicles you will have under your command. Each soldier can be awarded medals, rank and experience. You also can give him what and how much of each type of weapon plus ammunition to carry. Tanks will show what they are armed for and can show the types of damage they will take, such as lower to turret hits. The crews will have loaders, gunners, commanders and drivers.

There are just enough charts that you won’t be overwhelmed by them. One chart allows you to switch reserves with active troops. Another helps divide the experience points earned by each individual from the previous game. This means you’ll have to be careful on managing your troops so that they won’t end up dead and be replaced by green troops for the next gaming session.

The battlefield isn’t overwhelming either — even though it looks like the scenery can go on and on. The actual play area is just big enough that you’ll have room to maneuver but won’t get carried away with running all over the place. I had an example of this in which I was to wrest control of a train station from the Russians. Enough map was displayed to get the job done, but you felt that the countryside would go on forever, with its forests and rolling hills and golden fields of wheat. Is that good? Well, if you like repetition from game to game, that shouldn’t bother you. There wasn’t much change in the scenery. Buildings seem to be generic, the same types of fields, with the same types of hedges and trees. Other conditions might be included, but I never got farther in the seasons since I was playing summer battles.

The game has a good tutorial, which emphasize the line of sight and line of fire aspects of the game. An example was having two snipers take out an anti-tank crew. I couldn’t locate the crew except through a very narrow window in the line of sight. Once located, the line of fire was even tighter since the crew was hunkered down behind the weapon. The only way to take them out was to flank them and get side shots.

Are there some parts of the game that could be called boring? I would say yes, especially in the beginning since the battlefield is pretty big and setup can be a micro-managed nightmare. Things are slow going at the start. That’s not to say the action is at a standstill. Artillery and tanks have pretty good range, and even if you have a line of sight but line of fire is iffy, there still is area fire, which is basically taking pot shots in the general area and hoping for a hit on target.

Another nice thing about the game, depending on your view, are nonexistent supply lines. This means no worries about having a supply line to your troops. It also means no resupply of your ammo needs. You just can’t fire with abandon and must make sure you have targets of opportunity. I should mention that you can get reinforcements depending on the objectives being met during gameplay. Lastly, there are multiplayer capabilities.

You have a mission editor, game generator and a map editor. That’s a lot in one tight package. One thing I did dislike was the inability to surrender the game when it looked like I was losing. I would rather get penalized for failing to complete my objective than having to redo the battle. That doesn’t mean you can’t retreat your troops, but it has no meaning. Other than that, in my opinion, Theatre of War contains all the elements of a real-time game but gives you the opportunity to strategize before hand. I liked that aspect very much, and I’m sure you will as well.