It used an improved engine and was dressed up in fancy Warhammer outfits with lots of cool sound effects and psionic super-powers, but it still had that same wacky MC Escher version of reality. Skip ahead to about two years ago, when I reviewed Warhammer: Chaos Gate for IGN. It could take hours for six guys to navigate across a single city block. Playing that game was like fighting in some bizarre, Doctor Strange-type landscape where the normal laws of physics didn't apply: in this magical place, there were four distinct spatial dimensions, allowing enemies to be seen through vast chunks of terrain but not shot at, while time itself had been stretched out into immense, turn-based chunks.
Well I don't remember what score I gave Soldiers at War, but I'm still haunted by its vast black patches of terrain where missing elevations were supposed to be and its pixilated enemies that popped in and out of the map like some kind of weird ghostly gun-toting groundhogs. Plus it had the added bonus of being about World War II (remember, this was well before Saving Private Ryan, and games about WWII that were not obscure little hexagon, flat-counter wargames were few and far between). Darn it, I wanted to like that game - it was a lot like X-Com and Jagged Alliance, in that it was a turn-based, squad-level tactical thing in which you guided a bunch of guys through combat around some isometric maps. Long ago, way before the IGN network was conceived at some sinister Stonecutter's meeting, I did a magazine review of this game called Soldiers at War. Warned of what? Simple answer: Random Games and their horrible, horrible Soldiers at War engine. What the hell was I thinking? If I had even bothered to follow the development of this game as closely as Al Gore did his pet project, the Internet (okay, okay no more Election Day jokes), I would have been adequately warned away. Bush's whiskey-drenched breath at a sobriety checkpoint, I volunteered to do the review.Īfter all, as my stupid malfunctioning brain reasoned at the time, they've made decent computer translations of Risk and Axis & Allies, so why not bring back another classic? Sure, the Close Combat series is in many ways Squad Leader for the PC, but after five iterations that one's at least as old as Bob Dole, and it would be nice to see another take on the original design, maybe even a turn-based one. Many years ago I spent countless hours pushing little cardboard squares around in the classic Avalon Hill boardgame of the same name, and so with the warm glow of nostalgia hitting me like George W. When I saw this box sitting on Tal's desk with the words "Avalon Hill" and " Squad Leader" plastered across the front, I was on it quicker than Bill Clinton on an intern.
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