October 24, 2005 - World War II real-time strategy games come a dime a dozen, this allows for a lot of competition in the genre. Sometimes you end up with top-of the line titles, other times they simply fall a bit short. Then there are titles like Blitzkrieg II, the sequel to CDV’s release two years ago, which have a lot of potential but fail to fully utilize it.

Blitzkrieg 2 is one of those games that you’ll come to both love and hate. On one side of the coin, the game has amazing quality graphics and sound with a really entertaining style of gameplay. On the flipside, the game is filled with enough bugs that you need to download the update right away before you start playing. Even after updating the game, it still has crash bugs that you’ll find a nuisance. The game is a historical real time strategy game that takes place during the Second World War, and will have you take part in campaigns for the United States, Germany and the USSR. One of the highlights of the game is that all of the battles you participate in are as historically accurate as possible. On top of that, the units for all of the involved countries are designed to reflect the different types of units involved in the war, a true real-time simulation.

The campaign mode for Blitzkrieg 2 allows you to play as the Americans, Germans or the Russians. It doesn’t really matter which country with which you begin; Germany will eventually be defeated as the end of the war approaches. Each country’s story during the war is divided up into small campaigns, which contain about half a dozen missions plus one final mission that will complete the campaign before you move on. You don’t have to beat every single mission in order to play the final one, but there are advantages for finishing the other missions. Before you pick a mission to play, you will be able to see what rewards are offered for completing it. These rewards vary from upgrading units, to being rewarded with a new type of unit. Each campaign is allotted a certain number of reserve points, which are divided up amongst the playable missions. The final mission will have all of the remaining reserve points available. This brings up an interesting dilemma. Do you finish an optional mission so that you can have a new unit? Or do you skip it so that you have more reserve points for the final mission and finish the campaign? These are the kinds of decisions that you will have to make between missions on the campaign map.

The campaign map is where you will be able to choose which mission you want to take on next. Any of the missions are playable except for the mission that will complete the campaign. This mission will have certain prerequisites that you have to meet before you can play it. In this mission you will use all of your remaining reserve points and have all of your available units ready for deployment. As I mentioned before, each mission has rewards for completing it, some missions will also allow you to use new types of units. These new units can have a significant effect on the final battle of the campaign, so it is usually worth finishing all of the missions while at the same time trying to minimize your losses.

Each type of unit can have a commander assigned to it. This commander does not actually participate in battles, but allows the unit type to increase in experience so that it can receive new abilities. Each type of unit has four different abilities that it can learn, that will significantly affect the gameplay. For example, one of the final abilities for the tank unit types is the ability to fire their canon while moving. This is an extremely powerful ability, as a moving target is a lot harder to hit than one that is not moving at all.