Rating: Release Date: June 28, 2006 Distributor: Cinemaware Marquee Related Sites: · Moscow To Berlin: Red Siege Official Site Grade: C

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Like most of the recent Cinemaware Marquee games, system requirements are pretty easy to meet, my extra desktops in various forms of disrepair could be slapped together and run this game at recommended settings. The game runs nearly perfectly for me, and I don’t recall a single crash during the time I played it, very little in the way of slowdown and acceptable loading times, this could be in part to the general speed the game plays at, which is relatively slow. System requirements are as follows:

Minimal
Operating System: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 1 GHz
RAM: 256 Mb
Hard Disk Space: 1.2GB
Video Card: 64MB 3D accelerator

Recommended
Operating System: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 1.4 GHz
RAM: 512 Mb
Hard Disk Space: 1.2GB
Video Card: 128MB 3D accelerator.

Presentation

The game takes place during World War II, specifically following the conflict between Russian and German forces. You are the commander for small groups of units given specific objectives to complete in each mission. The game switches back and forth between German and Russian forces, which can be seen as positive or negative. It allows you to have a sample of both forces and the victories they achieved, but it also makes it difficult to get attached to a specific side.

Gameplay

The gameplay is another area where there is a clear line of good and bad. While you do control a decent sized force, and you do get reinforcements from time to time, there is no construction or training of new units like many other games in the RTS genre. You are dropped into a scenario and have to win with what you have present. There is a total of four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Extreme. There is a definite jump in difficulty from each level, something that is not always easy to distinguish. The easy and normal levels aren’t too bad, but moving up to hard or extreme gives exactly the type of challenge you should expect, usually ending with the enemy handily wiping up your forces the first few tries. Movement is much like any other RTS, just rope up who you want to move and click on the destination. The movement is linear, so moving over great distances is generally not the best idea, as there is land mines and other natural objects that tend to get the AI screwed up. The manual even shows the historic movement of troops for each scenario, however overwhelm with greater numbers works just as well in this as it does in most other games of this type. The game has single player with a 20 mission campaign, as well as multiplayer mode, however finding people to play with can be a bit tricky. The included encyclopedia full of all the statistics for vehicles is also available, which is a nice feature.

Graphics

This is another relatively small game, with just 1.2GB of required space needed, most games now are three to four times that. The graphics are good for the space available, with the detail shown to explosions particularly good. There is plenty of environmental items to destroy, buildings, trees, and anything else is almost all capable of being blown up. The vehicles are by far better looking then the troops, however both suffer from slow movement speed and choppy animation. The movement could have been much more realistic to help the total experience. With the system requirements being easy, this game does look nice for the user of an older PC that can’t quite run all the new flashy games that have been coming out and require a monster of a video card as well as large amounts of RAM to run decently.

Sound

While fitting to the time period and being historically accurate, the songs are almost all slow orchestral stuff, which could downright knock you out if your playing the game late at night. Sound effects are decent, with good weaponry firing effects and troops talking in the correct languages.

Replay Value

There is a total of one campaign, with 20 different missions to play through. Once you complete it on one difficulty, you might have some replay out of the other difficulties, however after that point there is pretty much no replay value unfortunately.

Shortcomings

While having an accurate history lesson would seem like a nice bonus, and the potential was definitely there, the game falls short due to the heavy saturation of the RTS WWII market and the fact that there really isn’t much that stands out. It would take a lot to get to the point it needs to be to make it a truly worthwhile experience, but I would have to recommend waiting to pick this one up out of a bargain bin.