As things go, I was interested in playing another war game, so I decided to give Wacht am Rhein a try. After bringing up the main screen, I remembered that I had played another Close Combat game — I forget the title, but I said to myself, “Oh, no, I should have really looked this over before reviewing it.” I’ll explain myself a bit later in the review.

The meat of the game is Germany versus the United States. This is an overhead real-time-strategy-style game, and when I mean real time, the action begins immediately from the get go. I recommend the tutorial as you get a good idea of how things work. It doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to run through the whole thing. Without it, you will probably miss out on some important aspect of the game. I certainly did when first messing around; boy did I get my posterior whipped good.

We have three types of starting games: battles, operations and campaigns. There’s a generous amount of different battles to whet your appetite. Campaigns play out in segments just as operations do. Or you can just do a scenario if you’re short on time. Setup is easy; just follow the screens and make adjustments as needed. The default time per game is 30 minutes, but you can set it for a shorter time, which you may want to do. I had a few games in which the action stopped due a stalemate between both forces, and the battle may have lasted only 10 minutes or so. That leaves you with a whole 20 minutes of nothing happening. Boy is that boring. And you can’t speed up the action or have the game state a winner till the time limit expires.

Supply rules don’t really come into play as these are short battles, and ammunition becomes a factor as each soldier, mortar team, armored vehicle and antitank weapon will only have so much till they run out and become invective. Your men will follow orders up to a point. If morale gets low, they will desert or panic. They may retreat to better cover while you are asking them to move to a different position. They may save ammunition till better targets present themselves. This represents actions that may contradict what you desire on the field of battle.

You can affect battle conditions during the setup phase by clicking on what I call cheats, which may give you a greater chance to win or might mess up the battle as well. Troop movement is based on the whole squad. You want to move, the whole squad moves; the same goes for firing actions. Some of the actions include fast movement or sneaking, or you can say crawling, smoke, fire and a couple more commands. All of these can be brought up by right-clicking on the squad or armored vehicle and then left-clicking the desired area. Line of sight is simple green for clear, orange for a partially blocked and red for completely blocked. Elevation plays an important roll when it comes to firing commands. Cover also plays a role as you have poor to great cover. This affects defensive postures. You have plane, mortar and artillery support, but it’s a one-shot deal for the game in question.

What do I think of the game overall? It’s a good game, not great, but decent. Gameplay is fairly simple, and each battle doesn’t drag out — unless you end up with a stalemate. The mapping system has two different views: the normal 3D view and a 2D view — which can help in making tactical decisions. What I don’t care for is the fact that there is no pause feature. It’s a nice size game map so your troops are really spread out in some cases. While you’re giving commands to some troops, others are getting wiped out before you can get to them. It makes for some frustration. The battlefield is mainly generic with buildings, forests and open areas. Squads are hard to click on, and visually speaking it is so-so. If you like campaigns, multiplayer, create your own battles or feel that quickplay is your style, then this is a good product that can offer those features.